Page 10A
NATION/WORLD
East Oregonian
Family arrivals surge at border
between U.S.-Mexico in August
By ELLIOT SPAGAT
Associated Press
SAN
DIEGO
(AP)
— U.S. border authori-
ties arrested dramatically
more immigrant families
at the Mexico border in
August compared to previ-
ous months in a spike that a
Trump administration offi-
cial said Wednesday was the
result of “legal loopholes”
allowing children to avoid
immediate deportation to
their homelands in Central
America.
The number of families
arriving at the Mexico bor-
der reached 15,955, up from
12,274 in July, according
to Customs and Protection.
Families accounted for more
than one-third of people who
were stopped at the border.
Commissioner
Kevin
McAleenan
called
the
increase “a direct response
to gaps in the legal frame-
work,” adding, “we’re not
surprised by it, but it’s been
a very stark trend.”
The numbers offer a
glimpse into the impact of
the Trump administration’s
“zero tolerance” policy on
illegal crossings introduced
in April, which resulted in
the separation of more than
2,500 children from their
parents. President Donald
Trump effectively ended the
practice of separating fam-
ilies in June amid heavy
criticism.
The statistics also come
as the midterm elections are
approaching and immigra-
tion remains a key issue in
campaigns across the coun-
try. McAleenan, a Trump
appointee, called the situa-
tion “a crisis of significant
proportions from a human-
itarian perspective and a
security perspective.”
Overall, people arrested
or stopped at the border
totaled 46,560, up from
39,953 in July and 30,567 in
Thursday, September 13, 2018
Senate approves 1st
spending bill to avert
partial shutdown
By MATTHEW DALY
Associated Press
AP Photo/Matt York, File
In this July 18, 2018 file photo, a Honduran man carries his 3-year-old son as his
daughter and other son follow to a transport vehicle after being detained by U.S.
Customs and Border Patrol agents in San Luis, Ariz. Border arrest figures for August
2018 are the latest reminder of how crossings have shifted over the last decade
from predominantly Mexican men to Central American families and children. The
number of family arrivals reached 15,955, a sharp increase from July that Customs
and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan said was one of the highest
on record.
August 2017. Arrests have
risen from July to August
in four of the previous five
years, indicating seasonal
factors may be an influence.
Administration officials
have been encouraging asy-
lum seekers to turn them-
selves in at official border
crossings, instead of going
around them, but the August
figures suggest that message
isn’t getting through.
Family arrests by the
Border Patrol, a component
of Customs and Border Pro-
tection that polices between
ports of entry, soared to
12,774 in August from 9,281
in July. The increase in fami-
lies arriving at official cross-
ings climbed only slightly, to
3,181 from 3,027.
The arrest tally is the lat-
est reminder of how bor-
der crossings have shifted
from predominantly Mexi-
can men to Central Ameri-
can families and children.
Last week, the Trump
administration moved to
abandon a longstanding
court settlement that limits
how long immigrant chil-
dren can be kept locked up,
proposing new regulations
that would allow the govern-
ment to detain families until
their immigration cases are
decided.
Administration officials
said that ending the so-called
Flores agreement of 1997
will speed up the handling
of asylum requests while
also deterring people from
illegally crossing the border.
The move angered immi-
grant rights advocates and is
expected to trigger a court
battle.
Border arrests are an
imperfect gauge of illegal
crossings because they don’t
indicate how many people
got away.
Trump
touted
bor-
der arrests when they fell
sharply during his first few
months in office to less than
16,000 in April 2017. The
arrest tally rose in 11 of the
following 12 months, top-
ping 50,000 in March, April
and May of this year.
The administration said
Tuesday that it will expand
its tent shelter for immigrant
minors crossing the bor-
der to 3,800 beds and keep
it open through the end of
this year. The facility at Tor-
nillo, Texas, which origi-
nally opened with a 360-
bed capacity for 30 days, is
being expanded based on
how many children are in
the care of the U.S. Depart-
ment of Health and Human
Services.
WASHINGTON (AP)
— As a major hurricane
menaces the East Coast,
Congress is moving to
avert a legislative disaster
that could lead to a partial
government shutdown just
weeks before the November
midterm elections.
Senators
approved
a $147 billion package
Wednesday night to fund
the Energy Department,
veterans’ programs and the
legislative branch. The bill
is the first of three spending
packages Congress hopes to
approve this month to avoid
a government shutdown
when the new budget year
begins Oct. 1.
The measure, which
represents a compromise
between House and Senate
negotiators, was approved
92-5. The House is set to
vote on the package on
Thursday.
If all three compro-
mise spending packages
are approved by both cham-
bers and signed by Presi-
dent Donald Trump, they
would account for nearly 90
percent of annual spending,
including the military and
most civilian agencies.
Lawmakers would still
need a short-term patch for
a portion of the govern-
ment, including the Depart-
ment of Homeland Security,
which oversees Trump’s
long-promised wall along
the U.S.-Mexico border.
Approval of the initial
spending bill was so import-
ant to Republican leaders
that they moved up a vote
planned for Thursday, citing
the threat of Hurricane Flor-
ence bearing down on the
Southeast U.S. coast. The
storm is expected to make
landfall Friday or Saturday
in the Carolinas and create
havoc along the East Coast.
The bill represents a
marked departure from
recent years, when Con-
gress has routinely ignored
agency-specific
spend-
ing measures in favor of
giant “omnibus” packages
that fund the entire govern-
ment all at once. Trump has
said he won’t sign another
bloated bill, and lawmak-
ers have been working to
approve a series of smaller
spending measures.
“The American people
expect us to get our work
done. If we continue to
work together in a bipar-
tisan manner, we can suc-
cessfully fund nearly 90
percent of the federal gov-
ernment on time through
regular order — some-
thing Congress has not been
able to do in many years,”
said Senate Appropriations
Committee Chairman Rich-
ard Shelby, R-Ala.
“This package is not per-
fect, but that is the nature of
compromise,” added Ver-
mont Sen. Patrick Leahy,
the top Democrat on the
Appropriations panel.
Leahy said he was con-
cerned that the bill does
not do enough to cover
costs associated with a
program that allows vet-
erans to receive govern-
ment-paid health care at pri-
vate facilities.
“We do our veterans
no favors when we make
promises to them that we
cannot keep,” he said.
While generally upbeat
about the progress on spend-
ing legislation, lawmakers
from both parties remain
wary of a government shut-
down, which Trump has
threatened unless he gets
billions of dollars for the
wall — a key Trump cam-
paign promise.
BRIEFLY
Graham goes all in Pope Francis calls
on Team Trump
summit on abuse
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP)
— By the end, Sen. John
McCain had rejected Pres-
ident Donald Trump. The
president was so infuriated
by McCain he put a bit-
ing reference to the dying
Republican senator in his
stump speech. Yet one man
in Washington still had
hope for bridging the gap
between the two.
“I regret that he didn’t
have more time with Pres-
ident Trump,” Republi-
can Sen. Lindsey Graham
told The Associated Press
this week about McCain,
his late friend and mentor.
Graham noted McCain was
able to forgive his captors
during the Vietnam War.
“Who knows what would
have happened over time?”
Graham’s unexplained
optimism,
his
eager
attempts to soften Trump’s
rough edges, have confused
colleagues and caused dou-
ble-takes across Washing-
ton. The South Carolina
Republican was McCain’s
best friend in the Senate, a
self-described student of his
politics and personal integ-
rity. But he has deviated
dramatically in his approach
to the tempestuous and divi-
sive president.
When
establishment
Republicans recently nod-
ded knowingly at an anon-
ymous editorial criticizing
Trump’s run of the White
House, Graham was on
Fox calling it a left-wing
strategy to show Trump
as “crazy” and echoed the
president’s unproven charge
that the Russia probe “is
falling apart.”
In an interview with the
AP, Graham said McCain,
who lost two bids for the
White House, taught him
that the country must move
forward after elections.
That means “you have an
obligation” to help the pres-
ident, especially a fellow
Republican, he said. Gra-
ham says he’s warmed to
the president.
VATICAN CITY (AP)
— Pope Francis summoned
the presidents of the world’s
bishops’
conferences
Wednesday to a summit on
preventing clergy sex abuse
and protecting children,
responding to the greatest
crisis of his papacy with
the realization that Vati-
can inaction on the growing
global scandal now threat-
ens his legacy.
Francis’ key cardinal
advisers announced plans
for the summit early next
year the day before the pope
meets with U.S. church
leaders embroiled in their
own credibility crisis from
the latest accusations in the
Catholic Church’s decades-
long sex abuse scandal.
The meeting, sched-
uled for Feb. 21-24, would
assemble more than 100
churchmen to represent
every bishops’ conference.
Its convening signals aware-
ness at the highest levels of
the Catholic Church that
clergy sex abuse is a global
problem, not restricted to
some parts of the world or a
few Western countries.
Victims’
advocates
immediately dismissed the
event as belated damage
control, an action publi-
cized hastily as allegations
regarding Francis’ record of
handling abuse cases — and
accumulated outrage among
rank-and-file Catholic faith-
ful over covered-up crimes
— jeopardize his papacy.
“There’s absolutely no
reason to think any good will
come of such a meeting,”
given the church’s decades
of failure to reform, David
Clohessy, former director of
the victims’ advocacy group
SNAP, said.
Video shows
encounter with
rape accuser
NEW YORK (AP) — A
video of Harvey Weinstein
aired on television Wednes-
day showing him boldly
propositioning a woman
who later accused him of
rape and repeatedly touch-
ing her and stroking her arm
and back during what was
supposed to have been a
business meeting.
Melissa Thompson, who
sued Weinstein in June,
said she made the record-
ing, shown by Sky News,
while demonstrating video
technology for the movie
mogul-turned-#MeToo vil-
lain at his New York City
office in 2011.
Weinstein is seen on the
video rejecting a handshake
from Thompson and then
hugging her instead and
rubbing her back.
He then caresses her
shoulder as they sit side-by-
side in front of her laptop
computer.
At one point he tells her:
“Let me have a little part
of you. Can you give it to
me?”
‘60 Minutes’
chief Fager fired
NEW YORK (AP) —
CBS News on Wednes-
day fired “60 Minutes” top
executive Jeff Fager, who
has been under investiga-
tion following reports that
he groped women at par-
ties and tolerated an abusive
workplace.
The network news pres-
ident, David Rhodes, said
Fager’s firing was “not
directly related” to the alle-
gations against him, but
came because he violated
company policy. A CBS
News reporter working on
a story about Fager revealed
that he had sent her a text
message urging her to “be
careful.”
Fager is the third major
figure at CBS to lose his job
in the past year over mis-
conduct allegations, fol-
lowing news anchor Char-
lie Rose last November
and CBS Corp. CEO Leslie
Moonves on Sunday.
CBS News reporter
Jericka Duncan said she
received Fager’s message
after she started to work on
a story about him on Sun-
day, following the posting
of a New Yorker story with
fresh allegations that were
denied by Fager.
“There are people who
lost their jobs trying to harm
me and if you pass on these
damaging claims without
your own reporting to back
them up that will become
a serious problem,” Fager
wrote, according to Duncan.
U.S. ‘likely’ takes
top oil spot
The United States may
have reclaimed the title of
the world’s biggest oil pro-
ducer sooner than expected.
The U.S. Energy Infor-
mation Administration said
Wednesday that, based
on preliminary estimates,
America “likely surpassed”
Russia in June and August
after jumping over Saudi
Arabia earlier this year.
If those estimates are
right, it would mark the
first time since 1973 that
the U.S. has led the world
in output, according to gov-
ernment figures.
The energy information
administration and the Inter-
national Energy Agency, a
global group of oil-consum-
ing nations, had predicted that
the U.S. would eventually
pass Russia and Saudi Arabia
but possibly not until 2019.
U.S. production jumped
in recent years because
of techniques including
hydraulic fracturing, or
“fracking,” which is the use
of chemicals, sand, water
and high pressure to crack
rock formations deep below
ground, releasing more oil
and natural gas.
Apple shows off
its most expensive
iPhone to date
CUPERTINO,
Calif.
(AP) — Apple unveiled
three new iPhones on
Wednesday, including its
biggest and most expensive
model yet, as the company
seeks to widen the product’s
appeal amid slowing sales.
CEO Tim Cook showed
off the iPhone XS Max,
which has a bigger screen
than the one on last year’s
dramatically
designed
model , the iPhone X. It’ll
cost about $1,100, top-
ping the iPhone X, which
at $1,000 seemed jaw-drop-
ping at the time. An updated
iPhone X, now called the
XS, stays at $1,000.
As with the iPhone X,
both new phones have
screens that run from edge
to edge, an effort to max-
imize the display without
making the phone too awk-
ward to hold. The screen
needs no backlight, so black
would appear as truly black
rather than simply dark.
The Max model looks to be
about the size of the iPhone
8 Plus, though the screen
size is much larger.
The iPhone XS Max,
which will be available
on Sept. 21 — with orders
open the week before —
represents Apple’s attempt
to feed consumers’ appe-
tite for increasingly larger
screens as they rely on
smartphones to watch and
record video and to take
photos wherever they are.
By making more expen-
sive iPhones, Apple has
been able to boost its prof-
its despite waning demand
as people upgrade phones
less frequently. IPhones
fetched an average price of
$724 during the April-June
period, a nearly 20 percent
increase from a year earlier.
Organization picks
Chinese-born
doctor as leader
NEW YORK (AP) — A
Chinese immigrant who fled
her native country when she
was 8 was named Wednesday
as Planned Parenthood’s new
president, the first doctor to
hold the post in five decades.
Dr. Leana Wen will
assume the role Nov. 12,
six days after midterm elec-
tions in which Planned Par-
enthood’s political wing
plans to spend $20 million
on behalf of candidates who
support abortion rights.
Wen, who has been Bal-
timore’s health commis-
sioner for since 2015, will
be Planned Parenthood’s
sixth president over a cen-
tury of work providing mil-
lions of Americans with
birth control, sex education
and medical screenings.
The organization also
is the largest provider
of abortions in the U.S.,
making it a perennial
target for anti-abortion
activists. In recent years,
its foes have been striv-
ing — thus far unsuc-
cessfully — to halt the
flow of federal funds
that help Planned Parent-
hood provide some of its
non-abortion services.
Wen succeeds Cecile
Richards, who had been
president since 2006 before
resigning earlier this year.
‘Miraculous’: Boy
survives meat
skewer in skull
HARRISONVILLE, Mo.
(AP) — A 10-year-old Mis-
souri boy is recovering after
he was attacked by insects
and tumbled from a tree,
landing on a meat skewer
that penetrated his skull
from his face to the back of
his head.
But miraculously, that’s
where Xavier Cunning-
ham’s bad luck ended. The
skewer had completely
missed Xavier’s eye, brain,
spinal cord and major blood
vessels, The Kansas City
Star reports .
Xavier’s harrowing expe-
rience began Saturday after-
noon when yellow jack-
ets attacked him in a tree
house at his home in Har-
risonville, about 35 miles
south of Kansas City. He fell
to the ground and started to
scream. His mother, Gabri-
elle Miller, ran to help him.
His skull was pierced from
front-to-back with half a
foot of skewer still sticking
out of his face.