TV viewers get look at home of couple behind massacre
REDLANDS, Calif. (AP) — The kitchen had pots on the stove, dirty dishes in the sink and a half-eaten pita sandwich. In a bedroom, there were boxes of diapers next to a crib with mussed sheets and a desk with photo identification of Syed Farook.
Viewers around the world got an intimate look Friday at the home of Farook and Tashfeen Malik, two days after their modest Redlands apartment became an active crime scene and where authorities said the couple stored pipe bombs, tools and large caches of ammunition.
Camera crews were elbow-to-elbow as they broadcast live inside the home in a chaotic scramble, while about 100 journalists lodged on the front lawn. Television crews moved documents to position for their shots. Some picked through documents and photos and rummaged through bedrooms.
The images showed mundane details of everyday life. A mattress lay on a bedroom floor, covered with documents and Arabic books. The closet had clothes hanging and family photos on the top shelf, with a hole in the ceiling.
The living room table had several documents, including one that authorities left behind listing what they had seized. Walls were covered with decorative rugs with Arabic script.
FBI investigates Southern California attack as act of terror
SAN BERNARDINO, Calif. (AP) — The FBI announced Friday that it is investigating the mass shooting at a Southern California office party as an act of terrorism, but the agency’s director said there is no indication that the slain husband and wife who killed 14 were part of a larger plot or members of a terror cell.
While authorities did not cite specific evidence that led them to the terrorism focus, a U.S. law enforcement official revealed that the wife, Tashfeen Malik, had under a Facebook alias pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group and its leader. A Facebook official said Malik praised Islamic State in a post at 11 a.m. Wednesday, when the couple were believed to have stormed a San Bernardino social service center and opened fire.
Malik and her husband, Syed Farook, died several hours after the massacre in a fierce gunbattle with police.
The IS-affiliated news service Aamaq called Malik and Farook “supporters” of their Islamist cause but stopped short of claiming responsibility for the attack.
FBI Director James Comey would not discuss whether anyone affiliated with the Islamic State communicated back to Malik, but he said there was no indication yet that the plot was directed by ISIS or any other foreign terror group. He also declined to rule out that possibility based on further investigation.
Germany OKs military mission against Islamic State
BERLIN (AP) — Germany stepped up its contribution to the fight against the Islamic State group on Friday, with lawmakers overwhelmingly voting in favor of sending reconnaissance jets, a tanker plane and a frigate to provide broad noncombat support to the U.S.-led coalition flying airstrikes against the militants.
The move answers a call for help from France following last month’s deadly attacks in Paris. IS militants claimed responsibility for the Nov. 13 attacks that killed 130 people and wounded hundreds.
On Friday, Belgian and French authorities said they were hunting two new suspects in the Paris carnage. The men used fake identity cards and sent money to a relative of the man who orchestrated the attacks the day before the ringleader died in a shootout with French police, the Belgian prosecutor’s office said.
The German Parliament voted 445 in support of the mission against IS and 146 against, with seven abstentions. The plan received wide support from the ranks of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s governing coalition, a week after the German leader assured French President Francois Hollande that Germany would “act quickly” to help its ally.
German opposition lawmakers, however, questioned the effectiveness of military operations against the extremists. “You won’t fight IS that way. You’ll only strengthen it,” Left Party lawmaker Sahra Wagenknecht told Parliament.
Mexicans search for remains of loved ones in countryside
IGUALA, Mexico (AP) — The first time the men and women set out to dig for their missing relatives in Iguala, they didn’t know how.
Leaders of the expedition told them to look for discoloration in the dirt, evidence of recently turned soil. Look for depressions in the ground, they said. That may signal a clandestine grave.
They headed for the mountains with picks and shovels, and stopped at a field where someone recalled having detected a foul odor. Amid purple and yellow flowers, they dug — 10 centimeters, 20, 40. At 60 centimeters, they hit a human bone.
The gravediggers cried and prayed, and kept burrowing into the ground until they had unearthed six graves.
“We knew we were going to look for buried bodies, but we never imagined that was what we would find,” said Mario Vergara, whose brother had disappeared two years before. “What we saw broke us.”
Trump picked stock fraud felon as senior adviser
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump knew a man he named as a senior business adviser in 2010 had been convicted in a major Mafia-linked stock fraud scheme, according to Associated Press interviews and a review of court records.
Trump had worked with Felix Sater previously during the man’s stint as an executive at Bayrock Group LLC, a real estate development firm that partnered with Trump on numerous projects after renting office space from the Trump Organization. But Sater’s past was not widely known at the time because he was working as a government cooperator on mob cases and the judge overseeing Sater’s own case kept the proceedings secret. After Sater’s criminal history and past ties to organized crime came to light in 2007, Trump distanced himself from Sater.
Less than three years later, however, Trump tapped Sater for a business development role that came with the title of senior adviser to Donald Trump. Sater received Trump Organization business cards and was given an office within the Trump Organization’s headquarters, on the same floor as Trump’s own.
Trump said during an AP interview on Wednesday that he recalled only bare details of Sater.
“Felix Sater, boy, I have to even think about it,” Trump said, referring questions about Sater to his staff. “I’m not that familiar with him.”
