WASHINGTON — A Supreme Court with a new conservative majority takes the bench as Brett Kavanaugh, narrowly confirmed after a bitter Senate battle, joins his new colleagues to hear his first arguments as a justice.
Kavanaugh will emerge Tuesday morning from behind the courtroom’s red velvet curtains and take his seat alongside his eight colleagues. It will be a moment that conservatives have dreamed of for decades, with five solidly conservative justices on the bench.
Kavanaugh’s predecessor, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in June, was a more moderate conservative and sometimes sided with the court’s four liberal justices. Kavanaugh, in contrast, is expected to be a more decidedly conservative vote, tilting the court right for decades and leaving Chief Justice John Roberts as the justice closest to the ideological middle.
With justices seated by seniority, President Donald Trump’s two appointees will flank the Supreme Court bench, Justice Neil Gorsuch at one end and Kavanaugh at the other. Court watchers will be looking to see whether the new justice asks questions at arguments and, if so, what he asks. There will also be those looking for any lingering signs of Kavanaugh’s heated, partisan confirmation fight. But the justices, who often highlight their efforts to work together as a collegial body, are likely to focus on the cases before them.
ISTANBUL — The Washington Post published a surveillance image on Tuesday showing its missing Saudi contributor walking into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul a week ago, just before he disappeared. Turkish officials have said they fear the columnist was killed there.
Saudi Arabia has called the allegations that it killed writer Jamal Khashoggi as “baseless,” but has offered no evidence over the past seven days to show that he ever left the building.
The image released by the Post bore a date and time stamp, as well as a Turkish caption bearing Khashoggi’s name and that he was arriving to the consulate. The Post said “a person close to the investigation” shared the image with them, without elaborating.
The door Khashoggi walked in through appeared to be the main entrance of the consulate in Istanbul’s 4th Levent neighborhood, a leafy, upscale district near the city’s financial hub that’s home to several other consulates. However, the consulate has other entrances and exits as well, through which Saudi officials insist he left.
It’s unclear which camera the footage came from, nor who operated it. However, a number of closed-circuit surveillance cameras surround the area. Friends of Khashoggi say Turkish police have taken possession of footage from the neighborhood as part of their investigation.
As the deportees were led off the plane onto the steamy San Salvador tarmac, an anguished Araceli Ramos Bonilla burst into tears, her face contorted with pain: “They want to steal my daughter!”
It had been 10 weeks since Ramos had last held her 2-year-old, Alexa. Ten weeks since she was arrested crossing the border into Texas and U.S. immigration authorities seized her daughter and told her she would never see the girl again.
What followed — one foster family’s initially successful attempt to win full custody of Alexa — reveals what could happen to some of the infants, children and teens taken from their families at the border under a Trump administration policy earlier this year. The “zero-tolerance” crackdown ended in June, but hundreds of children remain in detention, shelters or foster care and U.S. officials say more than 200 are not eligible for reunification or release.
Federal officials insist they are reuniting families and will continue to do so. But an Associated Press investigation drawing on hundreds of court documents, immigration records and interviews in the U.S. and Central America identified holes in the system that allow state court judges to grant custody of migrant children to American families — without notifying their parents.
AMSTERDAM, N.Y. — A ceremony for the victims of the limousine crash that killed 20 people ended with participants lifting candles above their heads to signal unity and perseverance.
Over 1,000 people jammed a riverside park in Amsterdam, New York, for Monday night’s vigil as victims’ relatives tried to come to grips with the tragedy that happened as a group of friends and family were on their way to a 30th birthday party.
The supersized limo ran a stop sign and hit a parked SUV on Saturday in Schoharie (skoh-HAYR’-ee).
Authorities have yet to say how fast the limo was going or determine why it failed to stop and sped off the road at the bottom of a long hill.
The 19-seat vehicle had at least some seat belts, but it was unclear whether anyone was wearing them, National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt said.
ABS, Yemen — Sometimes, the raw material of Ali Ghomari’s work comes screaming from the skies over Yemen.
Missiles fired by Saudi-led coalition jets rain down on militiamen and civilians alike, killing and maiming thousands. Children, farmers and others collect shrapnel from their farmlands, from dirt alleys in impoverished neighborhoods, and offer it for sale to Ghomari and other artisans.
From missiles, they do not make ploughshares. They make knives — jambiyya (jam-BEE-yah), the ornamental daggers Yemeni men wear for prestige and as a show of courage.
Once, they were made of imported steel, but high prices have forced craftsmen to use the refuse of war. One kilogram (2.2 pounds) of fragment steel costs about 500 rials (less than $1), half the price of Turkish steel.
Ghomari, who is in his 50s, said he learned his craft from his father, who inherited the skill from his ancestors. The entire Ghomari family of seven households works as blacksmiths in the northern city of Abs; they sit in huts constructed of cinderblocks or tree branches, forging glowing metal around open fires.
From Associated Press