Police arrest 12 after night of terror in heart of London
Police arrest 12 after night of terror in heart of London
LONDON (AP) — British police arrested a dozen people Sunday in a widening terrorism investigation after attackers using a van and large knives turned a balmy evening of nightlife into a bloodbath and killed seven people in the heart of London.
Although the attackers were also dead, authorities raced to determine whether others assisted them, and Prime Minister Theresa May warned that the country faced a new threat from copycat attacks.
The county’s major political parties temporarily suspended campaigning with only days to go before the general election. May said the vote would take place as scheduled Thursday because “violence can never be allowed to disrupt the democratic process.”
The assault unfolded over a few terrifying minutes late Saturday, starting when a rented van veered off the road and barreled into pedestrians on busy London Bridge. Three men then got out of the vehicle with large knives and attacked people at bars and restaurants in nearby Borough Market until they were shot dead by police.
“They went ‘This is for Allah,’ and they had a woman on the floor. They were stabbing her,” witness Gerard Vowls said.
Trump may not block Comey testimony at key public hearing
WASHINGTON (AP) — Days before a highly anticipated hearing, President Donald Trump appears unlikely to try and block fired FBI Director James Comey from testifying, as a Senate panel pledged aggressive questioning into whether the president sought to obstruct a probe into his campaign’s relationship with Russia.
Comey, ousted last month amid the FBI investigation into possible Trump campaign ties to Russia, is set to testify Thursday before the Senate intelligence committee. The public hearing is expected to shed light on his private conversations with Trump in the weeks before his dismissal, including one discussion in which Trump allegedly asked Comey to drop an investigation of former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his Russian contacts.
There’s been no final decision as to whether Trump would invoke executive privilege, and the matter remains under discussion, according to two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Trump’s known to change his mind on major issues.
Lawmakers from both parties urged Trump not to stand in the way of Comey’s testimony.
“Clearly, it would be very, very troubling if the president of the United States is interfering in investigations that affect potentially the president and his closest associates,” said Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee. He said invoking executive privilege would be on “shaky legal ground.”
Suspect in attack made life about hate after prison
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — The suspect charged with fatally stabbing two Portland men who tried to stop his anti-Muslim tirade against two teenage girls built a life around hate speech and his right to use it.
Jeremy Joseph Christian, who has spent much of his adulthood behind bars, littered social media with erratic and menacing posts about his hatred of just about everything and everyone. He made death threats against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and ranted when Facebook deleted an anti-Semitic update.
“There is no feeling like being muzzled. Cut out your tongue,” he wrote in one post.
After years of spewing anger, prosecutors say, Christian acted on his fury last week aboard a light-rail train. He’s accused of screaming anti-Muslim insults at the girls, ages 16 and 17, and then slitting the throats of three men who came to their defense. Two of the men died, and a third was seriously wounded.
Christian continued screaming about free speech in the back of a patrol car, according to court documents.
After liberation from IS, Fallujah struggles to rebuild
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) — Even as Iraqi forces in Mosul close in on the last pockets of urban territory still held by the Islamic State group, residents of Fallujah in Iraq’s Sunni heartland are still struggling to rebuild nearly a year after their neighborhoods were declared liberated from the extremists.
After declaring the city liberated last June, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called the victory a major step toward unifying Iraq more than two years after nearly a third of the country fell to IS. “Fallujah has returned to the nation,” he declared in a speech broadcast nationwide.
But in the months that followed, while the Iraqi government compiled databases and set up tight checkpoints on the main roads in and out of Fallujah to screen residents for suspected ties with IS, it provided little in the way of reconstruction money, local officials say.