Missouri governor resigns amid widening investigations
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, a sometimes brash political outsider whose unconventional resume as a Rhodes scholar and Navy SEAL officer made him a rising star in the Republican Party, resigned Tuesday amid a widening investigation that arose from an affair with his former hairdresser.
The 44-year-old governor spent nearly six months fighting to stay in office after the affair became public in January in a television news report that aired immediately following his State of the State address. The probes into his conduct by prosecutors and lawmakers began with allegations stemming from the affair and expanded to include questions about whether he violated campaign-finance laws.
Greitens said his resignation would take effect Friday.
“This ordeal has been designed to cause an incredible amount of strain on my family — millions of dollars of mounting legal bills, endless personal attacks designed to cause maximum damage to family and friends,” he said in a brief statement from his Jefferson City office, his voice breaking at times.
He said he could not “allow those forces to continue to cause pain and difficulty to the people that I love.”
Inmate on leave kills 3 in Belgium, setting off terror probe
LIEGE, Belgium — A knife-wielding prison inmate on a 48-hour leave stabbed two police officers Tuesday in the Belgian city of Liege, seized their service weapons and shot them and a bystander to death before being mowed down by a group of officers, setting off a major terror investigation into the country’s most savage assault since 2016 suicide attacks.
Prime Minister Charles Michel acknowledged the assailant, who had a lengthy criminal record that included theft, assault and drug offenses, had appeared in three reports on radicalism but was still allowed to take a leave from prison.
“Is our system working when we see that these kind of people are running free?” asked vice premier Alexander De Croo, echoing the thoughts of many in a nation where armed police and gun-toting soldiers still patrol the streets in the wake of the March 2016 attacks that left 32 people dead at the Brussels airport and subway system
Tuesday’s attack happened outside a cafe in the eastern city of Liege when the assailant crept up on the two female officers from behind and stabbed them repeatedly.
“He then took their weapons. He used the weapons on the officers, who died,” the Liege prosecutor’s spokesman, Philippe Dulieu, told reporters.
Alberto remnants leave flooding, downed trees in wake
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The soggy remnants of Alberto moved toward the nation’s interior Tuesday, leaving scattered flooding and downed trees in the wake of the year’s first named tropical storm.
More than 25,000 power outages were reported in Alabama, many caused by trees rooted in soggy soil falling across utility lines.
But while forecasters said the subtropical depression could dump as much as 6 inches (15 centimeters) of rain inland, few major problems were reported so far.
“We’ve had a lot of rain, but we got lucky. It was a constant rain but not a heavy rain,” said Regina Myers, emergency management director in Walker County northwest of Birmingham.
Subtropical storm Alberto rolled ashore Monday afternoon in the Florida Panhandle and then weakened overnight to a depression. Beachcombers had returned to the white sands of the Northern Gulf by Tuesday morning, but forecasters still warned of dangerous currents.
Trump, critics trade angry immigration charges, falsehoods
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Democratic critics traded outraged, sometimes plainly false accusations about immigration Tuesday as the debate over “lost” children and the practice of separating families caught crossing the border illegally reached a new boiling point.
False charges flew on both sides. The White House wrongly blamed Democrats for forcing his administration to separate children from parents. Liberal activists and others, including some from media outlets, tried to highlight the issue by tweeting photos of young people in steel cages that actually were taken during the Obama administration. Others seized on reports the government had “lost” more than 1,000 children, though that wasn’t quite the case.
It all comes just in time for the midterm elections as Republicans and Democrats try to rally core voters by pointing fingers at one another. Trump won the presidency promising to build a wall along the southern border and end illegal immigration, and the White House believes stressing the same issues will drive voters to the polls and help the GOP hang on to their majorities in the Senate and House.
The White House is “really beating the immigration drum in the lead-up to the midterm elections as a rallying cry and as a way of mobilizing voter support for Trump and the candidates that he chooses,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute and former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton administration. “It does seem to provoke a ratcheting up across the board.”
Indeed, the situation grew so hostile over the holiday weekend that the president’s eldest daughter, White House adviser Ivanka Trump, came under fire for tweeting a photo of herself and her youngest son in their pajamas Sunday morning.
California, US team up on an issue that divides them: pot
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — An alarming increase in the use of a highly toxic and banned pesticide at illegal marijuana farms hidden on public land in California is leading U.S. and state officials to team up on an issue that recently divided them: pot.
They announced Tuesday they will use $2.5 million in federal money to target illegal grows even as they remain at odds over the drug and other issues. Federal law still bans pot, but U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said he will prioritize illegal weed rather than going after the world’s largest legal recreational marijuana market, a decision U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has left to the discretion of top federal prosecutors.
“The reality of the situation is there is so much black market marijuana in California that we could use all of our resources going after just the black market and never get there,” Scott said.
“So for right now, our priorities are to focus on what have been historically our federal law enforcement priorities: interstate trafficking, organized crime and the federal public lands,” said Scott, whom President Donald Trump appointed last year as U.S. attorney of inland California, from Bakersfield to the Oregon border.
Most of illegally grown California pot is destined for Midwestern and Eastern states where it is more profitable. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and others referred to the illegal grows as California’s new Gold Rush, bringing both riches and environmental devastation.