COLU @ CONCEPTS

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump had pushed many of America’s top corporate leaders to the breaking point with his inability to decisively condemn white supremacists — so they huddled on an 11:30 a.m. conference call Wednesday. The frustrated members of the White House policy forum — which included executives from General Electric, Wal-Mart, General Motors, Boeing, IBM and JPMorgan Chase — chose to dissolve their advisory panel. The White House was then phoned and Trump agreed that it was the right course of action, according to four people familiar with the talks who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations. It was a shocking setback for Trump. The president had reveled in his ability to draw billionaires and corporate titans into the Oval Office, where he touted deals to invest in factories and add factory jobs. But by equating the white supremacists whose actions led to deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia to a group of counter-protesters, Tr...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — The mother of the young woman mowed down while protesting a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville urged mourners at a memorial service Wednesday to “make my child’s death worthwhile” by confronting injustice the way she did. “They tried to kill my child to shut her up. Well, guess what? You just magnified her,” said Susan Bro, receiving a standing ovation from the hundreds who packed a downtown theater to remember 32-year-old Heather Heyer. Heyer’s death Saturday — and President Donald Trump’s insistence that “both sides” bear responsibility for the violence — continued to reverberate across the country, triggering fury among many Americans and soul-searching about the state of race relations in the U.S. The uproar has accelerated efforts in many cities to remove symbols of the Confederacy. Heyer was eulogized as a woman with a powerful sense of fairness. The mourners, many of them wearing purple, her favorite color, applauded as her mother...

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Ousted Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore is trying to play usurper to deep-pocketed Republican forces after making a runoff with incumbent Sen. Luther Strange in the state’s Senate primary. Getting to the runoff is a sweet win for Moore, who was twice stripped of his chief justice duties — for refusing to remove a biblical monument he installed in a state judiciary building and for resisting federal gay marriage rulings. And Moore is relishing his opportunity to repudiate what he calls “silk-stocking Washington elitists” as he heads into another clash between the GOP establishment and the party’s conservative populist wing. “They’ve got a clear choice in this coming election, somebody who represents Alabama values or somebody who represents Washington values. If they want to move this country forward and stop the stagnation in the U.S. Senate, they’ll vote for me,” Moore told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Strange’s campaign got the endorsement ...

CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Scientists have potentially narrowed the search area for the missing Malaysian airliner to three specific locations in the southern Indian Ocean through new satellite and drift analysis of the 2014 crash released Wednesday. But the Australian Transport Safety Bureau cautioned that the drift analysis by Australian science agency CSIRO is based on French satellite images of “probably man-made” floating objects without evidence that they were from Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Still, the locations could provide potential starting points to search within a 25,000-square-kilometer (9,700-square-mile) expanse identified by a panel of experts in November as the most likely resting place of the Boeing 777 and the 239 passengers and crew on board. That expanse adjoins the original search zone far southwest of Australia that was identified through satellite analysis of the final hours of the flight, which apparently ended when the plane ran out of fuel. ...

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. (AP) — Family members of the young woman mowed down while protesting a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville used her funeral as a rallying cry, telling mourners the best way to honor Heather Heyer is to continue her fight against injustice. “Let’s find that spark of conviction,” Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, told the hundreds who packed a downtown theater to remember Heyer on Wednesday. “Find what’s wrong and say to yourselves, ‘What can I do to make a difference?’” Heyer’s death on Saturday — and President Donald Trump’s insistence that “both sides” bear responsibility for the violence — continued to reverberate across the country, triggering fury among many Americans and soul-searching about the state of race relations in the U.S. The uproar has accelerated efforts in many cities to remove symbols of the Confederacy. Heyer, 32, was eulogized as a woman with a powerful sense of fairness. The mourners, many of them wearing purple, her favorite color, ...

BEIJING (AP) — A military solution to the North Korean missile threat would be “horrific” but allowing Pyongyang to develop the capability to launch a nuclear attack on the United States is “unimaginable,” the top U.S. military officer said Thursday in Beijing. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, told reporters that President Donald Trump directly has “told us to develop credible viable military options and that’s exactly what we’re doing.” Dunford was responding to questions about Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon saying in a new interview that the threat posed by North Korea cannot handled by force. “There’s no military solution, forget it,” Bannon told The American Prospect. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” In Bei...

HONG KONG (AP) — A court on Thursday overturned sentences that the prosecution said were too light and sent young Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong and two other student leaders of huge pro-democracy protests in 2014 to prison. The three were immediately taken to serve their sentences of up to eight months. Wong pumped his fist in air as he walked out of the dock into custody. The three were found guilty of leading or encouraging an illegal rally in September 2014 that kicked off the demonstrations known as the “Umbrella Movement.” Youthful activists brought major thoroughfares to a standstill for 11 weeks to protest Beijing’s plan to restrict elections in the Chinese-ruled former British colony. Last year, a lower court sentenced Wong and Nathan Law, a student leader who was later elected to the legislature, to community service and gave a third activist, Alex Chow, a suspended three-week prison sentence. A three-judge panel on Thursday decided to stiffen those sentences fol...