NATION & WORLD GLANCE
Jurors in Trump hush money trial hear recording of pivotal call on plan to buy affair story
NEW YORK – Jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to purchase the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former president.
A visibly irritated Trump leaned forward at the defense table, and jurors appeared riveted as prosecutors played the September 2016 recording that attorney Michael Cohen secretly made of himself briefing his celebrity client on a plan to buy Karen Mcdougal’s story of an extramarital relationship.
Though the recording surfaced years ago, it is perhaps the most colorful piece of evidence presented to jurors so far to connect Trump to the hush money payments at the center of his criminal trial in Manhattan. It followed hours of testimony from a lawyer who negotiated the deal for Mcdougal’s silence and admitted to being stunned that his hidden-hand efforts might have contributed to Trump’s White House victory.
“What have we done?” attorney Keith Davidson texted the then-editor of the National Enquirer, which had buried stories of sexual encounters to prevent them surfacing in the final days of the bitterly contested presidential race. “Oh my god,” came the response from Dylan Howard.
“There was an understanding that our efforts may have in some way... our activities may have in some way assisted the presidential campaign of Donald Trump,” Davidson told jurors, though he acknowledged under cross-examination that he dealt directly with Cohen and never Trump.
Captain sentenced to 4 years for criminal negligence in ery deaths of 34 aboard scuba boat
LOS ANGELES — A federal judge in Los Angeles on Thursday sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in prison and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel.
The Sept. 2, 2019, blaze was the deadliest maritime disaster in recent U.S. history, and prompted changes to maritime regulations, congressional reform and several ongoing lawsuits.
Captain Jerry Boylan was found guilty of one count of misconduct or neglect of ship officer last year. The charge is a pre-civil War statute colloquially known as seaman’s manslaughter. It was designed to hold steamboat captains and crew responsible for maritime disasters.
Family members pleaded with U.S. District Judge George Wu to give Boylan the maximum 10-year sentence in an impassioned hearing. Many cried, and Robert Kurtz, father of the sole deckhand killed, Alexandra Kurtz, brought a small container with him up to the lectern to address Boylan and the court.
“This is all I have of my daughter,” he said.
Yadira Alvarez is the mother of 16-year-old Berenice Felipe, who volunteered at an animal shelter and dreamed of becoming a marine biologist, and was the youngest of the 34 victims killed on the boat.
“He’s not a victim. He is responsible for my daughter not being here,” Alvarez said, while sobbing in court. “Can you imagine my pain?”
The Conception was anchored off Santa Cruz Island, 25 miles south of Santa Barbara, when it caught fire before dawn on the final day of a three-day excursion, sinking less than 100 feet from shore. During the hearing, Boylan’s attorney read a statement aloud to the court in which he expressed his condolences and said he has cried every day since the fire.
United Methodists remove anti-gay language from their of cial teachings
CHARLOTTE, N.C. – United Methodist delegates on Thursday removed a 52-year-old declaration from their official social teachings that deemed “the practice of homosexuality ... incompatible with Christian teaching” – part of a wider series of historic reversals of the denomination’s longstanding disapproval of LGBTQ activity.
The historic vote came as delegates also approved a new definition of marriage as a covenant between “two people of faith” while recognizing the couple may or may not involve a man and a woman. That replaces an exclusively heterosexual definition of marriage and followed a debate that exposed tensions between some U.S. and international delegates.
The 523-161 vote to approve a section of the church’s Revised Social Principles took place at the General Conference of the United Methodist Church in the penultimate day of their 11-day legislative gathering in Charlotte.
It came a day after the General Conference removed its longstanding ban on “self-avowed practicing homosexuals” from being ordained or appointed as ministers.
Maui sues cell carriers over wild re warning alerts that were never received during service outages
HONOLULU – Had emergency responders known about widespread cellphone outages during the height of last summer’s deadly Maui wildfires, they would have used other methods to warn about the disaster, county officials said in a lawsuit.
Alerts the county sent to cellphones warning people to immediately evacuate were never received, unbeknownst to the county, the lawsuit said.
Maui officials failed to activate sirens that would have warned the entire population of the approaching flames. That has raised questions about whether everything was done to alert the public in a state that possesses an elaborate emergency warning system for a variety of dangers including wars, volcanoes, hurricanes and wildfires.
Major cellular carriers were negligent in failing to properly inform Maui police of widespread service outages, county officials said in the lawsuit filed Wednesday in state court against Verizon Wireless, T-mobile USA, Spectrum Mobile and AT&T.