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Acting Veterans Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson speaks during a news conference at the VA Medical Center in Washington, Wednesday, June 18, 2014. The Veterans Affairs Department (VA) release the results from its Nationwide Access Audit, along with facility level patient access data for all Veterans health facilities.
Acting Veterans Affairs Secretary Sloan Gibson speaks during a news conference at the VA Medical Center in Washington, Wednesday, June 18, 2014. The Veterans Affairs Department (VA) release the results from its Nationwide Access Audit, along with facility level patient access data for all Veterans health facilities.

Correction: A German court issued an arrest warrant on June 17, 2013, for an 89-year-old Philadelphia man charged with complicity in the killing of 216,000 Jews at a Nazi death camp during World War II. An article in Thursday’s editions, based on an Associated Press report, erroneously reported when the court issued the warrant.

Long-waits data on vets increase to 10%

WASHINGTON -- About 10 percent of veterans seeking medical care at VA hospitals and clinics have to wait at least 30 days for appointments -- more than twice the percentage of veterans the government said last week were forced to endure long waits, the acting Veterans Affairs secretary said Wednesday.

Sloan Gibson said the higher number of veterans waiting 30 days or more is revealed in a report due out today. He called the increase unfortunate, but said it was probably an indication that more reliable data were being reported by VA schedulers, rather than an actual increase in veteran wait times.

"I don't like that we've got more veterans waiting, but at least we're getting better data" as the VA seeks to address widespread problems of long patient waiting times and falsified records to mask frequent long delays, Gibson said.

While he still is not 100 percent confident that all wait times listed on VA computers are accurate, "I have vastly greater confidence" in the list than he did in the past, when manipulation of patient times was widespread across the VA system, Gibson said.

Boston bombing suspect seeks D.C. trial

BOSTON -- Lawyers for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev asked Wednesday to have his trial moved to Washington, D.C.

The attorneys said in a motion filed Wednesday that their preliminary survey of the attitudes of potential jurors in Boston; Springfield, Mass.; New York City and Washington found that Washington would be the most favorable location for a trial.

Authorities say Tsarnaev and his brother planted two pressure-cooker bombs near the finish line of the 2013 marathon, killing three people and injuring more than 260 others.

Tsarnaev has pleaded innocent to federal charges. He could face the death penalty. His brother died after a shootout with police.

89-year-old held in Auschwitz deaths

PHILADELPHIA -- An 89-year-old Philadelphia man was ordered held without bail Wednesday on a German arrest warrant charging him with aiding and abetting the killing of 216,000 Jewish men, women and children while he was a guard at the Auschwitz death camp.

Retired toolmaker Johann "Hans" Breyer was arrested by U.S. authorities Tuesday night. Breyer spent the night in custody and appeared frail during a detention hearing in federal court, wearing an olive-green prison jumpsuit and carrying a cane.

Legal filings unsealed Wednesday in the U.S. indicate the district court in Weiden, Germany, issued a warrant for Breyer's arrest the day before, charging him with 158 counts of complicity in the commission of murder.

Each count represents a trainload of Nazi prisoners from Hungary, Germany and Czechoslovakia who were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau between May and October 1944, the documents said.

Breyer has admitted he was a guard at Auschwitz in occupied Poland during World War II, but has told The Associated Press that he was stationed outside the Auschwitz-Birkenau death-camp part of the complex and had nothing to do with the wholesale slaughter of about 1.5 million Jews and others behind the gates.

Judge whittles Utah immigration law

SALT LAKE CITY -- A federal judge issued a split ruling Wednesday on Utah's immigration law, upholding one key measure but striking down several others in legislation that was passed during a wave of immigration crackdowns around the country earlier this decade.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Clark Waddoups upheld a key provision requiring authorities to check the immigration status of people arrested for felonies or certain misdemeanors such as theft. But he set limits on how it can be implemented.

Waddoups's ruling struck down a provision that allows no-warrant arrests based solely on suspicion of immigration status. He also tossed a part of the law that made it a state crime to harbor a person in the country illegally and one that requires local officers to investigate immigration offenses.

The ruling comes more than a year after a hearing in the case and more than three years since the law was passed. The measure has been shelved pending a court review.

A Section on 06/19/2014

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