Biden tells Israel's Netanyahu future US support for war depends on new steps to protect civilians
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden issued a stark warning to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday that future U.S. support for Israel's Gaza war depends on the swift implementation of new steps to protect civilians and aid workers.
Biden and Netanyahu 's roughly 30-minute call just days after Israeli airstrikes killed seven food aid workers in Gaza added a new layer of complication to the leaders’ increasingly strained relationship. Biden’s message marks a sharp change in his administration’s steadfast support for Israel's war efforts, with the U.S. leader for the first time threatening to rethink his backing if Israel doesn’t change its tactics and allow much more humanitarian aid into Gaza.
The White House would not specify what could change about U.S. policy, but it could include altering military sales to Israel and America's diplomatic backup on the world stage.
Netanyahu’s office said early Friday that his Security Cabinet has approved a series of “immediate steps” to increase the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, including the reopening of a key crossing that was destroyed in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack.
Administration officials had said before that announcement that the U.S. would assess whether the Israeli moves go far enough.
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The true toll of the war in Ukraine is measured in bodies. This man brings them home, one at a time
DOVHENKE, Ukraine (AP) — The smell in the car is sick and sweet, the overpowering scent of corpses that have lain too long in muck and ruin, the ones the dogs didn’t devour. Oleksii Yukov, a 38-year-old martial arts instructor who leads a team of volunteer body collectors in Ukraine, doesn’t notice.
He is on the phone with one of the mothers. She heard her son was injured in battle and left behind, but she’s not sure where.
“He was left to die and now they are telling me that ‘he died as a hero!?’” she says, choking out words between sobs.
“Don’t cry,” Yukov tells her. “Because if you get weak — no one will help him ... Don’t cry in front of anyone! They are not worth it. Cry in front of the grave of your son only.”
“We will take everyone back,” he promised. “We just need some time.”
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Trump says Israel has to get war in Gaza over 'fast' and warns it is 'losing the PR war'
NEW YORK (AP) — Former President Donald Trump offered a tough message to Israel over its war against Hamas on Thursday, urging the country to: “Get it over with.”
In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump said that Israel is “absolutely losing the PR war” and called for a swift resolution to the bloodshed.
“Get it over with and let’s get back to peace and stop killing people. And that’s a very simple statement," Trump said. "They have to get it done. Get it over with and get it over with fast because we have to -- you have to get back to normalcy and peace.”
The presumptive GOP nominee, who has criticized President Joe Biden for being insufficiently supportive of Israel, also appeared to question the tactics of the Israeli military as the civilian death toll in Gaza continues to mount. Since Hamas militants attacked Israel on Oct. 7, Israel’s military has battered the territory, killing more than 30,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, and creating a humanitarian catastrophe.
“I’m not sure that I’m loving the way they’re doing it, because you’ve got to have victory. You have to have a victory, and it’s taking a long time," Trump said.
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Senior UK jurists have joined calls to stop arms sales to Israel. Other allies face similar pressure
LONDON (AP) — More than 600 British jurists, including three retired judges from the U.K. Supreme Court, are calling on the government to suspend arms sales to Israel, piling pressure on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak after the deaths of three U.K. aid workers in an Israeli strike.
Britain is just one of a number of Israel's longstanding allies whose governments are under growing pressure to halt weapons exports because of the toll of the six-month-old war in Gaza.
In an open letter to Sunak published late Wednesday, the lawyers and judges said the U.K. could be complicit in “grave breaches of international law” if it continues to ship weapons.
Signatories, including former Supreme Court President Brenda Hale, said Britain is legally obliged to heed the International Court of Justice’s conclusion that there is a “plausible risk of genocide” in Gaza.
The letter said the “sale of weapons and weapons systems to Israel … falls significantly short of your government’s obligations under international law.”
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Federal report finds 68,000 guns were illegally trafficked through unlicensed dealers over 5 years
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 68,000 illegally trafficked firearms in the U.S. came through unlicensed dealers who aren’t required to perform background checks over a five-year period, according to new data released Thursday by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives.
That represents 54% of the illegally trafficked firearms in the U.S. between 2017 and 2021, Justice Department officials said. The guns were used in 368 shooting cases, which are harder to investigate because unlicensed dealers aren't required to keep records of their sales that could allow federal agents to trace the weapon back to the original buyer, said ATF Director Steve Dettelbach.
The report ordered by Attorney General Merrick Garland is the first in-depth analysis of firearm trafficking investigations in more than 20 years. It examined more than 9,700 closed ATF firearm trafficking investigations that began between 2017 and 2021. Firearms trafficking is when guns are purposely moved into the illegal market for a criminal purpose or possession.
The second-highest share of firearm-trafficking cases investigated by ATF was straw purchases, when someone buys a gun for a person who can’t get it legally themselves.
The report also shows that the recipients of trafficked firearms were people who had previously been convicted of a felony in almost 60 percent of the cases in which investigators were able to identify the background of the recipient. Furthermore, trafficked firearms were used to commit additional crimes in almost 25 percent of the cases, Dettelbach said. That includes more than 260 murders and more than 220 attempted murders, according to the report.
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April nor'easter with heavy, wet snow pounds Northeast, knocks out power to hundreds of thousands
A major spring storm brought heavy snow, rain and high winds to the Northeast, downing trees and power lines and leaving nearly 700,000 homes and businesses without power at one point. A woman was killed by a falling tree in a New York City suburb and a second woman died in a New Hampshire fire caused by the weather.
Two feet of snow was expected in parts of northern New England by Thursday evening, with wind gusts of 50 to 60 mph (80 to 97 kph) in coastal areas and inland, according to the National Weather Service. Moderate to heavy snow was forecast to continue in the evening and into Friday in areas of higher terrain.
Maine and New Hampshire bore the brunt of the power outages, with about 310,000 and 125,000, respectively, as of Thursday night, according to poweroutage.us. Local officials said the heavy, wet snow was to blame for bringing down trees and power lines.
“This was pretty much a classic nor’easter,” said Stephen Baron, a meteorologist for the weather service in Gray, Maine. “This is definitely a high-end storm for April. It’s not crazy for us to get snow in April, but not usually getting double-digit amounts.”
The weather service said it was the biggest April nor'easter to hit the region since 2020.
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No Labels won’t run a third-party campaign after trying to recruit a centrist presidential candidate
NEW YORK (AP) — The No Labels group said Thursday it will not field a presidential candidate in November after strategists for the bipartisan organization failed to attract a high-profile centrist willing to seize on the widespread dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
“No Labels has always said we would only offer our ballot line to a ticket if we could identify candidates with a credible path to winning the White House,” Nancy Jacobson, the group's CEO, said in a statement sent out to allies. “No such candidates emerged, so the responsible course of action is for us to stand down.”
The unexpected announcement further cements the general election matchup between the two unpopular major party candidates, Biden and Trump, leaving anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the only prominent outsider still seeking the presidency. Kennedy says he has collected enough signatures to qualify for the fall ballot in five states.
No Labels' decision, which comes just days after the death of founding chairman Joe Lieberman, caps months of discussions during which the group raised tens of millions of dollars from a donor list it has kept secret. It was cheered by relieved Democrats who have long feared that a No Labels' ticket would fracture Biden's coalition and help Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
The Wall Street Journal first reported No Labels' decision.
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Judge rejects Trump request to dismiss classified documents prosecution
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge refused Thursday to throw out the classified documents prosecution of Donald Trump, turning aside defense arguments that a decades-old law permitted the former president to retain the sensitive records after he left office.
Lawyers for Trump had cited a 1978 statute known as the Presidential Records Act in demanding that the case, one of four against the presumptive Republican nominee, be tossed out before trial. That law requires presidents upon leaving office to turn over presidential records to the federal government but permits them to retain purely personal papers. Trump's lawyers have said he designated the records as personal, making them his own property, and that that decision can not be second-guessed in court.
Prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team countered that the law had no relevance to a case concerning the mishandling of classified documents and said the files Trump is alleged to have hoarded at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida were unquestionably presidential records, not personal ones, and therefore had to be returned to the government when Trump left the White House.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who heard arguments on the dispute last month, permitted the case to proceed in a three-page order that rejected the Trump team claims. She wrote that the indictment makes “no reference to the Presidential Records Act" nor does it “rely on that statute for purposes of stating an offense.” The act, she said, ”does not provide a pre-trial basis to dismiss" the case.
The ruling is the second time in three weeks that Cannon has rebuffed defense efforts to derail the case. It represents a modest win for Smith's team, which has been trying to push the prosecution forward to trial this year but has also expressed mounting frustration, including earlier this week, with Cannon's oversight of the case.
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In the aftermath of the Moscow concert hall attack, is a harsher era under Putin in the works?
Video and photos of suspects in a mass shooting show them apparently being brutalized by Russian security forces — without any rebuke from authorities. A top Kremlin official urges that hit squads be sent to assassinate Ukrainian officials. Senior lawmakers call for restoring capital punishment, abolished decades ago.
The aftermath of the Moscow concert hall attack that killed 145 people in the bloodiest assault in Russia in two decades seems to be setting the stage for even harsher rule by President Vladimir Putin following his highly orchestrated electoral landslide last month.
Putin vowed to hunt down the masterminds of the March 22 attack that he linked to Ukraine despite Kyiv's vehement denials and a claim of responsibility by an offshoot of the Islamic State group. He warned ominously that terrorism is a “double-edged weapon.”
Putin lieutenant Dmitry Medvedev declared that if Ukrainian involvement is proven, Moscow should respond by deploying hit men to kill the country's leaders “in Kyiv or any other convenient place.”
The attack dealt a heavy blow to Putin less than a week after the vote that extended his rule for another six-years. It marked a major failure by his security agencies that were given an advance warning by the U.S. that extremists were planning an imminent attack.
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Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers have been in each other's orbit for years. The Final Four beckons
CLEVELAND (AP) — Their memories are blurry.
Of AAU tournaments and Team USA practices. Of gold medals and deep 3s. Of the girl with the brown ponytail with the unlimited range who always seemed to know what was coming next and the blonde who never got rattled with the ball in her hands, by opponents or the sea of eyes constantly transfixed on her.
Yet ask Iowa's Caitlin Clark and UConn's Paige Bueckers their earliest impression of the other and you get generalities, light on details if heavy on respect.
Maybe because those years shadowing each other on the travel circuit across the Midwest or teaming up for the occasional international competition seem so long ago. Maybe because in some ways — in the most meaningful of ways — they are.
The NCAA Tournament that Clark grew up watching in Iowa and Bueckers took in from the outskirts of Minneapolis doesn't exist anymore. Back then, the inequalities between the men's and women's versions of March Madness were massive, from facilities to swag to TV ratings, even the branding.
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