U.S. looks at wider laptop ban on flights
WASHINGTON -- Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said Sunday that he's considering banning laptops from the passenger cabins of all international flights to and from the United States.
That would dramatically expand a ban announced in March that affects about 50 flights per day from 10 cities, mostly in the Middle East. The current ban was put in place because of concerns about terrorist attacks.
The ban prevents travelers from taking laptops, tablets and certain other devices on board with them in their carry-on bags.
Kelly was asked on Fox News Sunday whether he would expand the ban to cover laptops on all international flights into and out of the U.S.
His answer: "I might."
"There's a real threat," Kelly said, adding that terrorists are "obsessed" with the idea of downing a plane in flight, "particularly if it's a U.S. carrier, particularly if it's full of mostly U.S. folks."
Kelly said that the U.S. is going "to raise the bar for, generally speaking, aviation security much higher than it is now, and there's new technologies down the road, not too far down the road, that we'll rely on. But it is a real sophisticated threat, and I'll reserve making that decision until we see where it's going."
Report: Ohio drug deaths top 4,000 in '16
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A newspaper survey of Ohio county coroners has found that more than 4,000 people died from drug overdoses last year in a state among the hardest hit by a heroin and opioid epidemic.
The Columbus Dispatch reported Sunday that the state's 4,149 unintentional fatal overdoses in 2016 are a 36 percent increase from the previous year, when just over 3,000 deaths were reported.
Citing an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation that used statistics from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the newspaper said Ohio led the nation in the total number of fatal overdoses in 2014 and 2015.
The increase is being attributed to heroin and the powerful synthetic opioids fentanyl and carfentanil.
Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, far outpaced the rest of the state with 666 deaths in 2016, with the majority of those deaths blamed on fentanyl use.
William Denihan, the outgoing chief executive officer of the Cuyahoga County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board, called the opioid epidemic a "tsunami."
"We've done so much, but the numbers are going the other way," Denihan said.
Ex-speaker accused of 5th sex assault
CHICAGO -- An Illinois man accuses Dennis Hastert in a new lawsuit of sexually assaulting him in bathroom stall when he was a fourth-grader, at least the fifth such allegation against the former House speaker who will soon be released from prison in a hush-money case.
The suit was filed in a suburban Chicago court for a man using the pseudonym Richard Doe. It alleges Hastert abused him after the boy stopped during a bicycle ride to use the restroom in the 1970s in Yorkville, Ill., where Hastert was a high school wrestling coach, the Chicago Tribune reported.
The former Republican Illinois congressman, 75, has nearly completed a 15-month sentence for breaking banking law in trying to pay $3.5 million in hush money to one victim. Previous accusers had been in high school.
Hastert's attorney didn't immediately return messages from The Associated Press on Sunday seeking comment. A hearing in the case is set for Tuesday.
The suit says Doe "was traumatized, repressed the sexual assault by Hastert, and was intimidated into silence." He says both Hastert and then-Kendall County State's Attorney Dallas Ingemunson warned the boy not to make the accusations public.
Reached Saturday by the DeKalb Daily Chronicle, Ingemunson told the newspaper that "all these things [the new accuser] is saying are untrue."
New voter-ID bill sent to Texas governor
AUSTIN, Texas -- The GOP-controlled Texas Legislature has approved a weakened voter-identification bill and sent it to Gov. Greg Abbott after a judge twice ruled that the original version deliberately tried to suppress voting by members of minority groups.
The changes given final approval Sunday expanded the list of acceptable forms of identification first devised in the original 2011 law to include passport cards and recently expired identifications. Still, gun licenses remain acceptable while college IDs aren't.
The new measure would let people without an ID cast a ballot by signing an affidavit. But anyone lying on affidavits could be charged with a felony.
In April, a federal judge reaffirmed that the original law intentionally discriminated. Democrats now want the judge to force Texas to get federal permission before changing election laws under the Voting Rights Act.
A Section on 05/29/2017