6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, JANUARY 26, 2018
WORLD IN BRIEF
Secret report:
Honduras’ new top cop
helped cartel move coke
Associated Press
Trump turns again
on immigration; allies
bash ‘Amnesty Don’
NEW YORK — Sick with the flu? You’ve got a lot of company.
The flu blanketed the U.S. again last week for the third straight week. Only Hawaii has
been spared.
Last week, 1 in 15 doctor visits were for symptoms of the flu. That’s the highest level since
the swine flu pandemic in 2009. The government doesn’t track every flu case but comes up
with estimates — one measure is how many people seek medical care for fever, cough, aches
and other flu symptoms.
Flu is widespread in every state except Hawaii, and 39 states reported high flu traffic for
doctors last week, up from 32.
At this rate, by the end of the season somewhere around 34 million Americans will have
gotten sick from the flu, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said today.
Some good news: Hospital stays and deaths from the flu among the elderly so far haven’t
been as high as in some other recent flu seasons. However, hospitalization rates for people 50
to 64 — baby boomers, mostly — has been unusually high, CDC officials said in the report,
which covers the week ending Jan. 20.
This year’s flu shot targets the strains that are making Americans sick, mostly the H3N2
flu virus. But exactly how well it is working won’t be known until next month. It’s the same
main bug from last winter, when the flu season wasn’t so bad. It’s not clear why this season
— with the same bug — is worse, some experts said.
In the U.S., annual flu shots are recommended for everyone age 6 months or older. Last
seasons, about 47 percent of Americans got vaccinated, according to CDC figures.
MIRYANG, South Korea — A fire raced
through a small South Korean hospital with
no sprinkler system today, killing 37 people,
many of them elderly, and injuring more than
140 others in the country’s deadliest blaze in
about a decade.
Sejong Hospital in the southeastern city of
Miryang has a separate nursing ward where
94 elderly patients were being treated, but all
of them were safely evacuated, fire officials
said.
Most of the victims were on the first and
second floors of the hospital’s six-story gen-
eral ward, where its emergency room and
intensive-care unit were located. Officials
believe the fire started in the emergency
room.
Mirayng police official Kim Han-su said
34 of the dead were women and 26 were in
their 80s or older. He said police may be
able to announce the cause of the fire on
Saturday.
Dark smoke and flames were pouring
from the emergency room when firefighters
arrived, so they used ladders to enter sec-
ond-floor windows. Some carried patients
on their backs to other rescuers below, who
moved them on stretchers to ambulances.
If safety issues were involved in the fire,
hospital and local authorities are likely to
receive harsh public criticism. In 2014, South
Korea grappled with the aftermath of a ferry
sinking that killed more than 300 people
and exposed serious shortcomings in public
safety. Officials blamed crew members’ neg-
ligence, overloaded cargo, improper storage,
unprofessional rescue work and corruption
by the ship’s owners.
N
PE
24 HOU R S
Michigan State athletic
director steps down in
Nassar fallout
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Michigan State
athletic director Mark Hollis tearfully announced
his retirement today, the second university offi-
cial to step down in as many days amid sharp
criticism over the school’s handling of sexual
abuse allegations against disgraced sports doc-
tor Larry Nassar.
Hollis, who had been in the job for 10 years,
disclosed the move during a meeting with a
small group of reporters on campus. He was
asked why he would not stay on.
“Because I care,” Hollis said, holding back
tears. “When you look at the scope of every-
thing, that’s the reason I made a choice to retire
now. And I hope that has a little bit, a little bit, of
helping that healing process.”
Michigan State President Lou Anna Simon
submitted her resignation late Wednesday, hours
after Nassar, a former employee at Michigan
State, was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison
for molesting young girls and women under the
guise of medical treatment. Several of the 150-
plus victims who spoke at his hearing were for-
mer athletes at the school, and many victims
accused the university of mishandling past com-
plaints about Nassar, who also is accused of
molesting Olympians and other young gymnasts
while working for USA Gymnastics..
R oyal C ab
L.L.C.
•
Fire at hospital
kills 37, injures scores
in South Korea
•
WASHINGTON — President Donald
Trump demanded the firing of special coun-
sel Robert Mueller last June but backed down
after White House lawyer Don McGahn threat-
ened to resign, according to a New York Times
report that Trump quickly dismissed today as
“fake news.”
The newspaper reported that Trump
demanded Mueller’s firing just weeks after the
special counsel was first appointed by Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.
McGahn said he would not deliver the
order to the Justice Department, according to
The Times, which cites four people familiar
with the request by the president.
Trump argued at the time that Mueller
could not be fair because of a dispute over golf
club fees that he said Mueller owed at a Trump
golf club in Sterling, Virginia. The president
also believed Mueller had a conflict of inter-
est because he worked for the same law firm
that was representing Trump’s son-in-law and
adviser Jared Kushner.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, did
not immediately return a call for comment
Thursday night. Ty Cobb, a White House law-
yer working on the response to the Russia
probe, declined comment Thursday night.
The response from Democrats was
nearly immediate. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.,
vice chairman of the Senate Select Commit-
tee on Intelligence, said that if the report in
The Times is true, Trump has crossed a “red
line.”
The report comes as Mueller moves
ever closer to interviewing Trump himself.
The president said Wednesday that he would
gladly testify under oath — although a White
House official quickly said afterward that
Trump did not mean he was volunteering to
testify.
Flu widespread across US
for third straight week
EK
President Trump denies
report that he ordered
Mueller fired
AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
Ana Martinez, a medical assistant at the Sea Mar Community Health Center, gives
a patient a flu shot in Seattle.
• O
NEW YORK — Fearing betrayal on
a signature campaign issue, President
Donald Trump’s loyalists are lashing out
against his proposal to create a path to cit-
izenship for nearly 2 million “Dreamer”
immigrants.
Trump-aligned candidates from Nevada
and Virginia rejected the notion outright. A
loyal media ally, Breitbart News, attacked him
as “Amnesty Don.” And outside groups that
cheered the hard-line rhetoric that dominated
Trump’s campaign warned of fierce backlash
against the president’s party in November’s
midterm elections.
“There’s a real potential for disaster,” said
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the far-
right Center for Immigration Studies. “The
president hasn’t sold out his voters yet. But
I think it’s important that his supporters are
making clear to him that they’re keeping an
eye on him.”
The public scolding is aimed at a presi-
dent who has changed course under pressure
before. It presents Trump with a significant
test on an issue that dominated his outsider
candidacy and inspired working-class voters
who propelled his rise. Now, barely a year into
his presidency, Trump can bend either to the
will of his fiery base or to the pressure to gov-
ern and compromise.
His leadership may determine the fate
of hundreds of thousands of young
immigrants and whether his party can improve
its standing among surging numbers of His-
panic voters.
Much of the country, including indepen-
dents and moderate Republicans, favors pro-
tections for thousands of young people brought
to the country as children illegally and raised
here through no fault of their own. But a vocal
conservative faction emboldened by Trump’s
anti-immigrant rhetoric will never accept any-
thing viewed as “amnesty.” And many view
legal protection for these young immigrants as
just that.
MEXICO CITY — When Jose David Agui-
lar Moran took over as Honduras’ new national
police chief last week, he promised to continue
reforming a law enforcement agency stained
by corruption and complicity with drug cartels.
But a confidential government security
report obtained by the Associated Press says
Aguilar himself helped a cartel leader pull off
the delivery of nearly a ton of cocaine in 2013.
The clandestine haul of more than 1,700
pounds of cocaine was packed inside a tanker
truck that, the report says, was being escorted
by corrupt police officers to the home of Wil-
ter Blanco, a drug trafficker recently convicted
in Florida and now serving a 20-year sentence.
Aguilar, who at the time was serving as chief
of intelligence for Honduras’ National Police,
intervened after a police official safeguarding
the drugs was busted by a lower-ranked officer
who had seized the tanker, the report says. The
handcuffed officer called Aguilar, who ordered
that the officer and the tanker be set free, says
the report which was prepared by the Hondu-
ran Security Ministry’s Inspector General.
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