Trump tours Texas flood sites and defends officials as questions mount about response
KERRVILLE, Texas (AP) — President Donald Trump on Friday toured the devastation from catastrophic flooding in Texas and lauded state and local officials, even amid mounting criticism that they may have failed to warn residents quickly enough that a deadly wall of water was coming their way.
Trump has repeatedly promised to do away with the Federal Emergency Management Agency as part of his larger pledges to dramatically shrink the size of government, and he's fond of decrying officials in Democrat-run states hit by past natural disasters and tragedy.
But the president struck a far more somber and sympathetic tone while visiting America's most populous Republican state — highlighting the heartbreak of what happened while effusively praising elected officials and first responders alike.
“The search for the missing continues. The people that are doing it are unbelievable,” Trump, seated with officials around a table with emblazoned with a black-and-white “Texas Strong” banner, said at a makeshift emergency operations center inside an expo hall in Kerrville.
He later added, “You couldn’t get better people, and they’re doing the job like I don’t think anybody else could, frankly."
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US is selling weapons to NATO allies to give to Ukraine, Trump says
WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is selling weapons to its NATO allies in Europe so they can provide them to Ukraine as it struggles to fend off a recent escalation in Russia’s drone and missile attacks, President Donald Trump and his chief diplomat said.
“We’re sending weapons to NATO, and NATO is paying for those weapons, 100%,” Trump said in an interview with NBC News late Thursday. “So what we’re doing is, the weapons that are going out are going to NATO, and then NATO is going to be giving those weapons (to Ukraine), and NATO is paying for those weapons."
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that some of the U.S.-made weapons that Ukraine is seeking are deployed with NATO allies in Europe. Those weapons could be transferred to Ukraine, with European countries buying replacements from the U.S., he said.
“It’s a lot faster to move something, for example, from Germany to Ukraine than it is to order it from a (U.S.) factory and get it there,” Rubio told reporters during a visit to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Ukraine badly needs more U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems to stop Russian ballistic and cruise missiles. The Trump administration has gone back and forth about providing more vital military aid to Ukraine more than three years into Russia's invasion.
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Trump administration has floated deporting third-party nationals to Africa. Here's what we know
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — South Sudan has accepted eight third-country deportees from the U.S. and Rwanda says it's in talk with the administration of President Donald Trump on a similar deal, while Nigeria says it's rejecting pressure to do the same.
Although few details are known, these initiatives in Africa mark an expansion in U.S. efforts to deport people to countries other than their own. The United States has sent hundreds of Venezuelans and others to Costa Rica, El Salvador and Panama but has yet to announce any major deals with governments in Africa, Asia or Europe.
While proponents see such programs as a way of deterring what they describe as unmanageable levels of migration, human rights advocates have raised concerns over sending migrants to countries where they have no ties or that may have a history of rights violations.
Last year, U.K. Supreme Court ruled that a similar plan to deport rejected asylum-seekers to Rwanda was illegal.
Earlier this week, Trump held a summit with five West African leaders in the White House, which highlighted the new transactional U.S. policy towards the continent.
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Appeals court throws out plea deal for alleged mastermind of Sept. 11 attacks
WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided federal appeals court on Friday threw out an agreement that would have allowed accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to plead guilty in a deal sparing him the risk of execution for al-Qaida’s 2001 attacks.
The decision by a panel of the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., undoes an attempt to wrap up more than two decades of military prosecution beset by legal and logistical troubles. It signals there will be no quick end to the long struggle by the U.S. military and successive administrations to bring to justice the man charged with planning one of the deadliest attacks ever on the United States.
The deal, negotiated over two years and approved by military prosecutors and the Pentagon’s senior official for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a year ago, stipulated life sentences without parole for Mohammed and two co-defendants.
Mohammed is accused of developing and directing the plot to crash hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Another of the hijacked planes flew into a field in Pennsylvania.
Relatives of the Sept. 11 victims were split on the plea deal. Some objected to it, saying a trial was the best path to justice and to gaining more information about the attacks, while others saw it as the best hope for bringing the painful case to a conclusion and getting some answers from the defendants.
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State Department lays off over 1,300 employees under Trump administration plan
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. State Department fired more than 1,300 employees Friday in line with a dramatic reorganization plan from the Trump administration that critics say will damage America's global leadership and efforts to counter threats abroad.
The department sent layoff notices to 1,107 civil servants and 246 foreign service officers with assignments in the United States, according to a senior department official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.
Notices said positions were being “abolished” and the employees would lose access to State Department headquarters in Washington and their email and shared drives by 5 p.m., according to a copy obtained by The Associated Press.
As fired employees packed their belongings, dozens of former colleagues, ambassadors, members of Congress and others spent a warm, humid day protesting outside. Holding signs saying, “Thank you to America’s diplomats” and “We all deserve better,” they mourned the institutional loss from the cuts and highlighted the personal sacrifice of serving in the foreign service.
“We talk about people in uniform serving. But foreign service officers take an oath of office, just like military officers,” said Anne Bodine, who retired from the State Department in 2011 after serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. “This is not the way to treat people who served their country and who believe in ‘America First.'”
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Boeing settles with a man whose family died in a 737 Max crash in Ethiopia
CHICAGO (AP) — Boeing reached a settlement Friday with a Canadian man whose wife and three children were killed in a deadly 2019 crash in Ethiopia, averting the first trial connected to a devastating event that led to a worldwide grounding of Max jets.
The jury trial at Chicago’s federal court had been set to start Monday to determine damages for Paul Njoroge of Canada. His family was heading to their native Kenya in March 2019 aboard Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 when it malfunctioned and plummeted to the ground. The wreck killed all 157 people on board.
Njoroge, 41, had planned to testify about how the crash affected his life. He has been unable to return to his family home in Toronto because the memories are too painful. He hasn’t been able to find a job. And he has weathered criticism from relatives for not traveling alongside his wife and children.
“He’s got complicated grief and sorrow and his own emotional stress,” said Njoroge’s attorney, Robert Clifford. “He’s haunted by nightmares and the loss of his wife and children.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed publicly.
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Furor over Epstein files sparks clash between Bondi and Bongino at the Justice Department
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department and FBI are struggling to contain the fallout and appease the demands of far-right conservative personalities and influential members of President Donald Trump’s base after the administration's decision this week to withhold records from the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation.
The move, which included the acknowledgment that one particular sought-after document never existed in the first place, sparked a contentious conversation between Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino at the White House earlier this week that threatened to permanently shatter relations between the two officials and centered in part on a news story that described divisions between the FBI and the Justice Department.
The cascade of disappointment and disbelief arising from the refusal to disclose additional, much-hyped records from the Epstein investigation underscores the struggles of FBI and Justice Department leaders to resolve the conspiracy theories and amped-up expectations that they themselves had stoked with claims of a cover-up and hidden evidence. Infuriated by the failure of officials to unlock, as promised, the secrets of the so-called “deep state,” Trump supporters on the far right have grown restless and even demanded change at the top.
Tensions that simmered for months boiled over on Monday when the Justice Department and FBI issued a two-page statement saying that they had concluded that Epstein did not possess a “client list,” even though Bondi had intimated in February that such a document was sitting on her desk, and had decided against releasing any additional records from the investigation.
The department did disclose a video meant to prove that Epstein killed himself in jail, but even that raised the eyebrows of conspiracy theorists because of a missing minute in the recording.
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Adult son convicted, sentenced to life for shooting and beheading father in Pennsylvania
A Pennsylvania man who posted a video of his father’s severed head on YouTube was convicted of murder Friday and sentenced to life without parole.
Bucks County Judge Stephen A. Corr found Justin D. Mohn, 33, guilty in the January 2024 shooting death of his father at their home in the Philadelphia suburb of Levittown.
After the sentencing, Bucks County District Attorney Jennifer Schorn told reporters Mohn had exhibited a “complete and utter lack of remorse,” calling it an “unimaginable, unfathomable crime.”
“We are satisfied that this was the right outcome to guarantee that the community at large is safe from Justin Mohn,” Schorn said.
His defense attorney called it an “undoubtedly difficult case to preside over."
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Flash floods once again hit Vermont, damaging homes and roads
SUTTON, Vt. (AP) — Communities in rural parts of Vermont on Friday woke up once again to damaged homes and washed-out roads due to heavy rainfall and flash flooding, making it the third consecutive summer that severe floods have inundated parts of the state.
Up to 5 inches (13 centimeters) of rain fell in just a few hours on Thursday, prompting rapid flooding as local waterways began to swell, said Robert Haynes, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Burlington office.
Nearly 20 homes were cut off in the small town of Sutton as a local brook quickly rose from its banks and surrounded buildings, Fire Chief Kyle Seymour said. His crews were called out to help rescue people from two homes, which required help from swift-water rescue teams called in from neighboring communities.
“This was an incredibly strong, quick-moving localized heavy water," Seymour said. “It overwhelmed all of our road culverts, all of our streams, all of our rivers. But the actual weather event lasted three hours, with the bulk of the rain concentrated within one hour."
Though the severity of the storms wasn't as widespread compared to the past two years, local officials were still surveying the extent of the damage Friday morning and shaking their heads that they were dealing with flood recovery for three years in a row.
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Son of ‘El Chapo’ pleads guilty in US drug case, promising cooperation for lighter sentence
CHICAGO (AP) — A son of notorious Mexican drug kingpin “El Chapo” pleaded guilty Friday to U.S. drug trafficking charges, becoming the first of the drug lord's sons to enter a plea deal.
Prosecutors allege Ovidio Guzman Lopez and his brother, Joaquin Guzman Lopez, ran a faction of the Sinaloa cartel. They became known locally as the “Chapitos,” or “little Chapos,” and federal authorities in 2023 described the operation as a massive effort to send “staggering” quantities of fentanyl into the U.S.
As part of a plea agreement, Ovidio Guzman Lopez admitted to helping oversee the production and smuggling of large quantities of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana and fentanyl into the United States, fueling a crisis that has contributed to tens of thousands of overdose deaths annually.
Guzman Lopez pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, money laundering and firearms charges tied to his leadership role in the cartel. Terms of the deal, including sentencing recommendations or cooperation agreements, were not immediately disclosed.
Speculation about a deal had percolated for months, as behind-the-scenes negotiations quietly progressed.
The Associated Press
