US newsrooms to Trump: We’re not enemies of the people
NEW YORK — The nation’s newsrooms are pushing back against President Donald Trump with a coordinated series of newspaper editorials condemning his attacks on “fake news” and suggestion that journalists are the enemy.
The Boston Globe invited newspapers across the country to stand up for the press with editorials on Thursday, and several began appearing online a day earlier. Nearly 350 news organizations have pledged to participate, according to Marjorie Pritchard, op-ed editor at the Globe.
In St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch called journalists “the truest of patriots .” The Chicago Sun-Times said it believed most Americans know that Trump is talking nonsense. The Fayetteville, N.C. Observer said it hoped Trump would stop, “but we’re not holding our breath .”
“Rather, we hope all the president’s supporters will recognize what he’s doing — manipulating reality to get what he wants,” the North Carolina newspaper said.
Some newspapers used history lessons to state their case. The Elizabethtown Advocate in Elizabethtown, Penn., for instance, compared free press in the United States to such rights promised but not delivered in the former Soviet Union.
Man arrested after overdoses at downtown city park
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — People are saying 46 people overdosed Wednesday from a suspected bad batch of “K2” synthetic marijuana at or near a city park in Connecticut. No deaths were reported, but officials said two people had life-threatening symptoms.
Most of the overdoses were on the New Haven Green, a popular, historic downtown park that borders part of Yale University, and officials said they expected the overdose total to increase. Police said they arrested a man believed to be connected to at least some of the overdoses.
“Do not come down to the Green and purchase this K2,” New Haven Police Chief Anthony Campbell told WVIT-TV. “It is taking people out very quickly, people having respiratory failure. Don’t put your life in harm.”
Paramedics and police officers were stationed at the park all day as more people fell ill. Some became unconscious and others vomited, authorities said. Emergency responders rushed to one victim as officials were giving a news conference nearby late Wednesday morning.
“We literally had people running around the Green providing treatment,” said Rick Fontana, the city’s emergency operations director.
Officials remove special rules for gene therapy experiments
U.S. health officials are eliminating special regulations for gene therapy experiments, saying that what was once exotic science is quickly becoming an established form of medical care with no extraordinary risks.
A special National Institutes of Health oversight panel will no longer review all gene therapy applications and will instead take on a broader advisory role, according to changes proposed Wednesday. The Food and Drug Administration will vet gene therapy experiments and products as it does with other treatments and drugs.
It’s an extraordinary milestone for a field that has produced only a few approved treatments so far, and not all experts agree that it doesn’t still need special precautions.
With gene editing and other frontiers looming, “this is not the right time to be making any moves based on the idea that we know what the risks are,” said Stanford bioethicist Mildred Cho.
Gene therapy aims to attack the root cause of a problem by deleting, adding or altering DNA, the chemical code of life, rather than just treating symptoms that result from a genetic flaw.
US officials: Iraqi refugee was part of terror group
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A refugee from Iraq was arrested Wednesday in Northern California on a warrant alleging that he killed an Iraqi policeman while fighting for the Islamic State organization.
Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, 45, and other members of ISIS killed the officer after the town of Rawah, Iraq, fell to the Islamic State in June 2014, according to court documents.
He was arrested by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force at a Sacramento apartment building based on a warrant issued in May by an Iraqi federal court in Baghdad. U.S. officials plan to extradite him back to Iraq under a treaty with that nation, and he made his first appearance in federal court in Sacramento on Wednesday.
Ameen could face execution for the “organized killing by an armed group” according to Iraqi documents filed in U.S. federal court.
Prosecutors say Ameen entered the U.S. under a refugee program, eventually settling in Sacramento, and attempted to gain legal status in the United States.