USA

BROWNSVILLE, Texas (AP) — U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Friday that authorities faced “extremely challenging” circumstances along the border with Mexico days before pandemic-related asylum restrictions end.

A surge of Venezuelan migrants through South Texas, particularly in and around Brownsville, has occurred over the last two weeks for reasons that Mayorkas said were unclear. On Thursday, 4,000 of about 6,000 migrants in Border Patrol custody in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley were Venezuelan.

NEW YORK (AP) — The jury hearing an advice columnist’s claims that she was raped by Donald Trump could begin deliberations as soon as Tuesday, and it will have wide latitude in deciding the truthfulness of the allegations against the former president.

The writer E. Jean Carroll, 79, testified that Trump raped her in 1996 inside a dressing room at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman store in Manhattan after they had a chance encounter and shopped together for lingerie.

OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — California’s reparations task force is set to wrap up its first-in-the-nation work Saturday, voting on recommendations for a formal apology for the state’s role in perpetuating a legacy of slavery and discrimination that has thwarted Black residents from living freely for decades.

The nine-member committee, which first convened nearly two years ago, is expected to give final approval at a meeting in Oakland to a hefty list of ambitious proposals that will then be in the hands of state lawmakers.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Kentucky man with a long criminal record was sentenced Friday to a record-setting 14 years in prison for attacking police officers with pepper spray and a chair as he stormed the U.S. Capitol with his wife.

Peter Schwartz’s prison sentence is the longest so far among hundreds of Capitol riot cases. The judge who sentenced Schwartz also handed down the previous longest sentence — 10 years — to a retired New York Police Department officer who assaulted a police officer outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

ATLANTA (AP) — The prosecutor investigating possible illegal meddling in the 2020 election in Georgia has agreed to immunity deals with at least eight Republican fake electors who signed a certificate falsely stating that then-President Donald Trump had won the state.

Defense attorney Kimberly Debrow revealed the existence of the immunity deals in a court filing Friday, saying her eight clients had accepted the agreements last month. The filing does not identify the people who were offered immunity deals.

UNITED NATIONS, May 5 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The United Nations is short nearly $24 million needed to safely remove oil from an abandoned tanker off Yemen’s coast, officials said Thursday, urging donors to stump up the remaining funds.

A virtual donor conference on Thursday raised $5.6 million in new contributions towards the $129 million unprecedented rescue operation, in which the UN purchased its own supertanker to remove more than a million barrels of oil from the beleaguered FSO Safer in the Red Sea.

WASHINGTON/PARIS/DUBAI, May 5 (Reuters) - Even as the United States and its European allies grapple with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and rising tensions with China, the smoldering crisis over Iran's nuclear program threatens to reignite.

In a sign of European concern, Britain, France and Germany have warned Iran they would trigger a return of U.N. sanctions against Tehran if it enriched uranium to the optimal level for a nuclear weapon, three European officials said.

WASHINGTON, May 5 (Reuters) - The drones that crashed over the Kremlin earlier this week probably evaded an extensive number of defenses in and around Moscow, suggesting they might have been launched from inside Russia, U.S.-based drones experts said.

Footage of the unmanned aircraft has sent governments and open source intelligence analysts on a hunt to discover the origin of the drones designed to fly to a destination and explode.

May 5 (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued its largest ever award of nearly $279 million to a whistleblower whose information helped the regulator's enforcement action, it said on Friday.

The regulator did not disclose the case concerned in its statement.

The award is more than double the $114 million that it had issued in October 2020.

WASHINGTON (AP) — China was the biggest global jailer of journalists last year with more than 100 behind bars, according to a press freedom group, as President Xi Jinping’s government tightened control over society.

Xi’s government also was one of the biggest exporters of propaganda content, according to Reporters without Borders. China ranked second to last on the group’s annual index of press freedom, behind only neighbor North Korea.