'She should be alive today' — Harris spotlights woman's death to blast abortion bans and Trump

ATLANTA (AP) — Kamala Harris blasted Donald Trump as a threat to women's freedoms and their very lives, warning in a speech in the battleground state of Georgia on Friday that Republicans would continue to choke off access to abortion if he returns to the White House.

The Democratic vice president's visit came days after ProPublica reported that two women in the state died after they did not get proper medical treatment for complications from taking abortion pills to end their pregnancies.

Such deaths, Harris said, were not only preventable but predictable because of laws that have been implemented since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Although Georgia's six-week ban allows abortions in early pregnancy to save a mother's life, critics say the law has created dangerous confusion for doctors about when they're allowed to provide care.

“Good policy, logical policy, moral policy, humane policy is about saying a healthcare provider will only start providing that care when you’re about to die?” Harris asked.

Harris shared the story of Amber Thurman, a mother who decided to have an abortion when she became pregnant again.

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Secret Service report details communication failures preceding July assassination attempt on Trump

WASHINGTON (AP) — Communication breakdowns with local law enforcement hampered the Secret Service's performance during a July campaign rally where former President Donald Trump was shot and wounded, according to a report released Friday that lays out a litany of missed opportunities to stop a gunman who opened fire from an unsecured roof.

A five-page document summarizing the key conclusions of a yet-to-be finalized Secret Service report lays bare the cascading and wide-ranging failings that preceded the July 13 shooting at the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally at which Trump was struck in the ear by gunfire.

Those include an absence of clear guidance from the Secret Service to local law enforcement, the failure to fix line-of-sight vulnerabilities at the rally grounds that left Trump open to sniper fire and “complacency” among some agents, said Ronald Rowe Jr., the agency's acting director.

Though the failed response has been well documented through congressional testimony, news media investigations and other public statements, the summary document released Friday marks the Secret Service's most formal attempt to catalog the errors of the day and comes amid fresh scrutiny of the agency following Sunday's arrest of a man who authorities say stalked Trump at a Florida golf course.

“This was a failure on the part of the United States Secret Service. It’s important that we hold ourselves to account for the failures of July 13th and that we use the lessons learned to make sure that we do not have another failure like this again,” Rowe said at a news conference accompanying the release of the summary.

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Robinson won't appear at Trump's North Carolina rally after report on online posts, AP sources say

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson will not appear at former President Donald Trump ’s rally on Saturday in the battleground state following a CNN report about Robinson’s alleged disturbing online posts, an absence that illustrates the liability the gubernatorial candidate poses for Trump and downballot GOP candidates.

Robinson is not expected to attend the event in Wilmington, according to a person on the Trump campaign and a second person familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning.

Robinson has been a frequent presence at Trump's North Carolina campaign stops. The Republican nominee has referred to Robinson, who is Black, as “Martin Luther King on steroids" and long praised him. But in the wake of Thursday's CNN report, the Trump campaign issued a statement that didn't mention Robinson and instead spoke generally about how North Carolina was key to the campaign's efforts.

Robinson's campaign didn't respond to a text Friday seeking confirmation on his Saturday plans. The deadline in state law for Robinson to withdraw as the Republican candidate for governor passed late Thursday. State Republican leaders could have picked a replacement had a withdrawal occurred.

Robinson has denied writing the posts, which include racial and sexual comments. He said he wouldn't be forced out of the race by “salacious tabloid lies.” While Robinson won his GOP gubernatorial primary in March, he's been trailing in several recent polls to Democratic nominee Josh Stein, the state's attorney general.

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Rare Israeli airstrike in Beirut kills Hezbollah commander and more than a dozen others

BEIRUT (AP) — Israel launched a rare airstrike that killed a senior Hezbollah military official in a densely populated southern Beirut neighborhood on Friday. It was the deadliest such strike on Lebanon’s capital in decades, with Lebanese authorities reporting at least 14 people killed and dozens more wounded in the attack.

The Israeli military’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, said the strike on Beirut's southern Dahiya district killed Ibrahim Akil, a commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, as well as 10 other Hezbollah operatives.

“We will continue pursuing our enemies in order to defend our citizens, even in Dahiya, in Beirut,” said Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, describing the Israeli strike that targeted Akil as part of “a new phase of war.”

Several hours later, Hezbollah confirmed Akil's death. In a statement, the Lebanese militant group described Akil as “a great jihadist leader” and said he had “joined the procession of his brothers, the great martyr leaders, after a blessed life full of jihad, work, wounds, sacrifices, dangers, challenges, achievements, and victories.”

Akil served on Hezbollah’s highest military body, the Jihad Council. He was sanctioned by the United States for his alleged involvement in the 1983 bombing that killed more than 300 people at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the U.S. Marine Corps barracks.

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Did Middle East device attack violate international law? Advocates want an investigation

GENEVA (AP) — Human rights advocates are calling for an independent investigation into the deadly explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon and Syria, suggesting the blasts may have violated international law if the devices were fashioned as booby traps.

The explosions that have been widely blamed on Israel killed at least 37 people and wounded more than 3,000, including many members of the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah. Israel has not confirmed or denied involvement.

The United Nations human rights office and some advocacy groups have cried foul, arguing that the strikes were “indiscriminate” because it's nearly impossible to know who was holding the devices, or where they were, when they went off. But some academics insist the explosions were precisely focused because the devices had been distributed to Hezbollah members.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which aims to help protect civilians and other noncombatants in conflict and aims to stay neutral, said: “This was a unique operation, and it will take time to have all the facts to establish a legal opinion."

The committee declined to comment publicly about whether the operation violated international humanitarian law, which is difficult to enforce and sometimes flouted by countries.

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Tiny Kentucky town is rocked as their sheriff is jailed in the killing of a prominent judge

WHITESBURG, Ky. (AP) — Residents of a tiny Appalachian town struggled Friday to cope with a shooting involving two of its most prominent citizens: a judge who was gunned down in his courthouse chambers and a local sheriff charged with his murder.

“It’s just so sad. I just hate it,” said Mike Watts, the Letcher County circuit court clerk. “Both of them are friends of mine. I’ve worked with both of them for years.”

It wasn’t clear what led to the shooting. The preliminary investigation indicates Letcher County Sheriff Shawn “Mickey” Stines shot District Judge Kevin Mullins multiple times following an argument inside the courthouse, according to Kentucky State Police.

Mullins, 54, who held the judgeship for 15 years, died at the scene, and Stines, 43, surrendered without incident. He was charged with one count of first-degree murder.

The fatal shooting stunned the tight-knit town of Whitesburg, the county seat, with a population of about 1,700 people, 145 miles (235 kilometers) southeast of Lexington.

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South Carolina inmate dies by lethal injection in state’s first execution in 13 years

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina put inmate Freddie Owens to death Friday as the state restarted executions after an unintended 13-year pause because prison officials couldn’t get the drugs needed for lethal injections.

Owens was convicted of the 1997 killing of a Greenville convenience store clerk during a robbery. While on trial, Owens killed a person incarcerated at a county jail. His confession to that attack was read to two different juries and a judge who all sentenced him to death.

Owens, 46, made no final statement. His last meal was two cheeseburgers, french fries, well-done ribeye steak, six chicken wings, two strawberry sodas and a slice of apple pie.

When the curtain to the death chamber opened, Owens was strapped to a gurney, his arms stretched to his sides. After the drug was administered, he said “bye” to his lawyer and she said “bye" to him.

He smiled slightly and his facial expression did not change much before he appeared to lose consciousness after about a minute. Then his eyes closed and he took several deep breaths. His breathing got shallower and his face twitched for another four or five minutes before the movements stopped.

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Western nations were desperate for Korean babies. Now many adoptees believe they were stolen

Yooree Kim marched into a police station in Paris and told an officer she wanted to report a crime. Forty years ago, she said, she was kidnapped from the other side of the world, and the French government endorsed it.

She wept as she described years spent piecing it together, stymied at every turn to get an answer to a simple question: How was she, a bright, diligent schoolgirl, with known parents whom she loved, documented as an abandoned orphan in South Korea in 1984 and sent to strangers in France? She believes the government of France — along with many Western nations — allowed families to “mail order children” through international adoption, and did nothing to protect them.

“They were reckless,” she said. “They never questioned anything. They never checked where I was from. They never checked whether my parents existed or not.”

Kim was caught in an adoption machine that sent hundreds of thousands of Korean children to families in the United States, Europe and Australia. Now adults, many have since discovered that their adoption paperwork was untrue, and their quest for accountability now has spread far beyond South Korea’s borders to the Western countries that claimed them.

Those governments turned a blind eye to rampant fraud and sometimes pressured the South Korean government to keep the kids coming, an investigation led by The Associated Press has found. Documents show that at the peak of adoptions from South Korea, Western diplomats processed papers like an assembly line, despite evidence that adoption agencies were aggressively competing for babies to send abroad, pressuring mothers and paying hospitals. Governments focused on satisfying intense demand from Western families desperate for children.

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Passenger on a previous Titan sub dive says his mission was aborted due to apparent malfunction

A paid passenger on an expedition to the Titanic with the company that owned the Titan submersible testified before a U.S. Coast Guard investigatory panel Friday that the mission he took part in was aborted due to an apparent mechanical failure.

The Titan submersible imploded last year while on another trip to the Titanic wreckage site. A Coast Guard investigatory panel has listened to four days of testimony that raised questions about the company’s operations before the doomed mission.

Fred Hagen was first to testify Friday and was identified as a “mission specialist,” which he and other witnesses have characterized as people who paid a fee to play a role in OceanGate’s underwater exploration. He said his 2021 mission to the Titanic was aborted underwater when the Titan began malfunctioning and it was clear they were not going to reach the fabled wreck site.

The Titan appeared to be off course on its way to the Titanic, so the crew decided to use thrusters so the submersible could make its way to the wreck, Hagen said. The starboard thruster failed to activate, he said.

“We realized that all it could do was spin around in circles, making right turns,” Hagen said. “At this juncture, we obviously weren't going to be able to navigate to the Titanic.”

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New York magazine says its star political reporter is on leave after a relationship was disclosed

New York magazine says that its highly regarded Washington correspondent, Olivia Nuzzi, is on leave after disclosing that she violated the publication's standards by having a personal relationship with a former reporting subject.

The newsletter Status, which broke the story, and The New York Times both cite unnamed sources in identifying Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the other person involved with Nuzzi. She has not confirmed Kennedy’s involvement, and Kennedy said in a statement that he had only met her once.

David Haskell, New York magazine editor in chief, said in a note to staff members on Friday that Nuzzi told them the relationship began last December, “after we had published her November profile.” Her only published profile that month was of Kennedy. The relationship reportedly ended in August, he wrote.

It’s an explosive development for the magazine and Nuzzi, whose piece featuring an interview with Donald Trump, “Peering into Donald Trump’s Ear, and Soul,” was featured on its most recent cover. Haskell said online versions of the Trump story and one Nuzzi wrote about Biden this summer will direct readers to a note explaining the situation.

Posted late Thursday, New York said in the note that if it had been aware of the relationship, Nuzzi would not have been permitted to cover the presidential campaign.