WASHINGTON (AP) — A spokesman for Mike Pence said Wednesday that the former vice president will not appeal a judge's order compelling him to testify in the Justice Department's investigation into efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The decision sets up a possible appearance by Pence in the coming weeks before a federal grand jury scrutinizing attempts by the former president and supporters before the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to undo Democrat Joe Biden's victory.
Multiple Trump administration officials have testified in that investigation, as well as in a separate inquiry examining Trump's possession of classified documents, but Pence would be the highest-profile witness to answer questions before a grand jury. His closed-door testimony could offer investigators a firsthand account of Trump's state of mind in the pivotal weeks after he lost to Biden and further expose the rift in their relationship since the end of their administration.
The strain could grow as Pence approaches a likely 2024 run for the presidency and a challenge to Trump, who already is in the race for the Republican nomination.
After Pence was subpoenaed months ago by the Justice Department's special counsel, lawyers for Trump objected on executive privilege grounds. But a federal judge in Washington last week rejected those arguments, forcing Pence to testify.
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BALTIMORE (AP) — More than 150 Catholic priests and others associated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore sexually abused more than 600 children over the past 80 years, according to a state report released Wednesday that accused church officials of decades of cover-ups.
The report paints a damning picture of the archdiocese, which is the oldest Roman Catholic diocese in the country and spans much of Maryland. Some parishes, schools and congregations had more than one abuser at the same time — including St. Mark Parish in Catonsville, which had 11 abusers living and working there between 1964 and 2004.
The Maryland Attorney General's Office issued the report during Holy Week — considered the most sacred time of year in Christianity ahead of Easter Sunday — and said the number of victims is likely far higher.
"The staggering pervasiveness of the abuse itself underscores the culpability of the Church hierarchy," the report said. "The sheer number of abusers and victims, the depravity of the abusers' conduct, and the frequency with which known abusers were given the opportunity to continue preying upon children are astonishing."
The disclosure of the redacted findings marks a significant development in an ongoing legal battle over their release and adds to growing evidence from parishes across the country as numerous similar revelations have rocked the Catholic Church in recent years.
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GLEN ALLEN, Mo. (AP) — A large tornado ripped through southeastern Missouri before dawn on Wednesday, killing at least five people and causing widespread destruction as the third in a series of deadly massive storms over the past two weeks struck the nation's heartland.
Forecasters kept a wary eye out for more possible tornadoes, hail and extreme weather as this year's early storm season continued. It has spawned dozens of tornadoes, mainly in the South and Midwest, that have killed at least 63 people. Just last weekend, confirmed or suspected tornadoes in at least eight states laid waste to neighborhoods across a broad swath of the country.
Midwest tornadoes have typically occurred later in the spring, but this year's early spate of severe weather continues a trend seen over the past few years, said Bill Bunting, chief of forecast operations at the National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
The Missouri tornado touched down around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday and moved through a rural area of Bollinger County, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) south of St. Louis, said Sgt. Clark Parrott of the Missouri State Highway Patrol.
Trees were uprooted and homes turned into piles of splinters. One building was flipped on its side. Drone footage showed emergency crews peering into the wreckage with flashlights.
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First lady Jill Biden's walk-back of her suggestion that runner-up Iowa should join NCAA women's basketball champion LSU for a visit to the White House didn't sit well with Tigers star Angel Reese.
Prompted by a discussion of Biden's comments during her Wednesday appearance on "The Paper Route Podcast," Reese said the Tigers should celebrate their title with former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama rather than Joe and Jill Biden.
Jill Biden, at an appearance in Denver on Monday, had praised Iowa's sportsmanship and congratulated both teams. She also said that as part of the longstanding tradition of having champions visit the White House, Iowa should come as well "because they played such a good game."
The Tigers defeated Iowa 102-85 for the title in Dallas on Sunday.
Reese on Monday called Jill Biden's suggestion "a joke."
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A novel treatment using supercharged immune cells appears to work against tumors in children with a rare kind of cancer, researchers reported Wednesday.
Nine of 27 children in the Italian study had no sign of cancer six weeks after the treatment, although two later relapsed and died.
The treatment — called CAR-T cell therapy — is already used to help the immune system fight leukemia and other cancers in the blood. This is the first time researchers have achieved such encouraging results in solid tumors, experts in the field said, and raises hopes that it can be used against other kinds of cancers.
It's too soon to call it a cure for neuroblastoma, a nerve tissue cancer that often starts in infancy in the adrenal glands near the kidneys in the abdomen.
Standard treatment can be intense, involving chemotherapy, surgery and radiation, depending on the cancer's stage and other factors. The children in the study had cancers that had come back or were particularly hard to treat.
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NEW YORK (AP) — When Donald Trump stepped into a Manhattan courthouse Tuesday afternoon, his usual bravado was replaced with palpable anger and notable silence as the former president was reduced to a criminal defendant in custody.
By the time he returned to his Mar-a-Lago club hours later, he was ready to unleash.
"The only crime that I have committed is to fearlessly defend our nation from those who seek to destroy it," the first former president to be indicted told a crowd of hundreds of loyal supporters.
Trump made an unlikely transformation from reality television star to U.S. president by tapping into the grievance of Republican voters disillusioned with the political establishment. As he wages a comeback bid for the White House, Trump and his campaign hope his indictment will serve as a rallying cry that will galvanize the same voters. Already, he has raised millions of dollars off the news.
It's an approach that will test Trump's "all publicity is good publicity" adage as his decades-long history of bending the world to his will collides with cold legal reality.
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NEW YORK (AP) — Twitter has labeled National Public Radio as "state-affiliated media" on the social media site, a move some worried Wednesday could undermine public confidence in the news organization.
NPR said it was disturbed to see the description added to all of the tweets that it sends out, with John Lansing, its president and CEO, calling it "unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way."
It was unclear why Twitter made the move. Twitter's owner, Elon Musk, quoted a definition of state-affiliated media in the company's guidelines as "outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution."
"Seems accurate," Musk tweeted in a reply to NPR.
NPR does receive U.S. government funding through grants from federal agencies and departments, along with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The company said it accounts for less than 1% of NPR's annual operating budget. But until Wednesday, the same Twitter guidelines said that "state-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the United States, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy."
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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Bob Lee, a technology executive who created Cash App and was currently chief product officer of MobileCoin, was fatally stabbed in San Francisco early Tuesday, according to the cryptocurrency platform and police.
Officers responded to a report of a stabbing on Main Street at 2:35 a.m. Tuesday and found a 43-year-old man with stab wounds, the San Francisco Police Department said in a press release. The victim died at a hospital.
Police did not identify the victim but MobileCoin confirmed Lee's death in response to an email from The Associated Press on Wednesday.
"Our dear friend and colleague, Bob Lee passed away yesterday at the age of 43, survived by a loving family and collection of close friends and collaborators," MobileCoin CEO Josh Goldbard said in a statement.
Lee was "made for the new world," Goldbard wrote.
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UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Russia's commissioner for children's rights, who is being sought for war crimes for deporting children from Ukraine, told a U.N. meeting Wednesday that the children were taken for their safety and Moscow is coordinating with international organizations to return them to their families.
Ambassadors from Western countries boycotted the informal U.N. Security Council meeting, sending low-level diplomats instead. Diplomats from the United States, Britain, Albania and Malta walked out when the commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, started to address the meeting by video link.
The International Criminal Court last month issued an arrest warrant for her and Russian President Vladimir Putin, accusing them of abducting children from Ukraine.
Russia, which holds the rotating presidency of the Security Council this month, called the meeting to counter what it claims is disinformation about the Ukrainian children.
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters before the session that the United States strongly opposed the briefing and joined the United Kingdom in blocking the United Nations from outside broadcast of the meeting.
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BLUMENAU, Brazil (AP) — A man with a hatchet burst into a day care center Wednesday in Brazil, killing four children, authorities said, in an attack that shook the country and put pressure on the government to curb a rising tide of violence.
At least four other children were wounded in the attack in Blumenau, a city of 366,000 in southern Brazil, near the Atlantic coast.
The assailant, who got inside by jumping over a wall, turned himself in at a police station, officials said. He did not appear to have any connection with the center, which offers nursery services, preschool education and after-school activities. The dead were between the ages of 5 and 7, authorities said.
Authorities were searching for a motive, the police detective leading the investigation, Ronnie Esteves, told television reporters.
Hours after the attack, the justice and education ministers pledged to invest in new violence-prevention efforts.
