COLU @ CONCEPTS

WASHINGTON (AP) — The co-founder of a Washington opposition research firm that produced a dossier of salacious allegations involving President Donald Trump met for hours with congressional investigators Tuesday in a closed-door appearance that stretched into the evening. Glenn Simpson’s lawyer emerged from the daylong private appearance with the Senate Judiciary Committee and said his client had “told Congress the truth and cleared the record on many matters of interest.” The lawyer, Josh Levy, noted that Simpson appeared voluntarily and said he had so far been the only witness to participate in a private interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee as the panel looks into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The sheer length of Simpson’s appearance — far longer, for instance, than Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, spent earlier this summer before Senate and House intelligence committees — reflected the intrigue on Capitol Hill surrounding the dossier and t...

DETROIT (AP) — Sailors with ties to Michigan, Illinois and Ohio are among 10 who are missing after a U.S. warship collided with an oil tanker in Southeast Asia. U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis said he was informed by Logan Palmer’s family that the central Illinois man is missing. In Michigan, April Brandon said the military informed her that her son, Ken Smith, is also missing. The family of Jacob Drake, 21, was told that the western Ohio man was among the missing, the Columbus Dispatched  reported  Tuesday. The USS John McCain collided with an oil tanker off Singapore on Monday. Adm. Scott Swift said some bodies have been found in a flooded compartment of the warship. No other details have been released. Brandon said Smith’s father, stepmother and grandfather served in the Navy. She said Smith, 22, grew up in Novi, Michigan, and moved to Norfolk, Virginia, as a teen with his father. “His father and I couldn’t be prouder of our son,” Brandon said. “He’s a great kid. He’s...

MADRID (AP) — An extremist cell was preparing bombs for an imam who planned to blow himself up at a Barcelona monument, a key suspect in the attacks that killed 15 people in northeastern Spain told a judge Tuesday, according to a judicial official. The suspect, Mohamed Houli Chemlal, was one of four men taken before Spain’s National Court in Madrid to testify about the Islamic cell that attacked pedestrians in Barcelona and the nearby seaside town of Cambrils last week. National Court Judge Fernando Andreu questioned the four about the vehicle attacks as well as the fatal explosion at a bomb-making workshop that police said scuttled the group’s plot to carry out a more deadly attack at unspecified Barcelona monuments. After the session, the judge ordered two of the surviving suspects held without bail, another detained for 72 more hours and one freed with restrictions. A Spanish judicial official said Houli Chemlal, 21, and suspect Driss Oukabir, 28, identified imam Abdelbak...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Never tip your hand to the enemy. No timelines for military operations. No free pass for a neighbor who tolerates extremists or enables U.S. foes. In President Donald Trump’s new Afghanistan strategy, elements of a broader approach to America’s most pressing national security concerns begin to emerge, consistent with his efforts in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. Though details are limited, the plan draws on organizing principles that are also woven throughout his plans for defeating the Islamic State group and containing the threats posed by North Korea and Iran. Trump’s advisers say his Afghan strategy reflects a consistent world view, both in terms of America’s overseas objectives and the tactics to achieve them. But it’s too soon to say whether he is being driven by a well-formed doctrine or merely coining catchphrases on the fly. “We are not nation-building again. We are killing terrorists,” Trump said in his Monday night speech. He was striving to differen...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Safety systems to prevent cars from drifting into another lane or that warn drivers of vehicles in their blind spots are beginning to live up to their potential to significantly reduce crashes, according to two studies released Wednesday. At the same time, research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety raises concern that drivers may be less vigilant when relying on automated safety systems or become distracted by dashboard displays that monitor how the systems are performing. The two institute studies found that lane-keeping systems, some of which even nudge the vehicle back into its lane for the driver, and blind-spot monitoring systems had lower crash rates than the same vehicles without the systems. The lane-keeping study looked at police crash data from 25 states between 2009 and 2015 for vehicle models where the systems were sold as optional. Lane-keeping systems lowered rates of single-vehicle, sideswipe and head-on crashes of all severities ...

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Saudi police have arrested a 14-year-old boy who was filmed dancing at an intersection in the Red Sea city of Jiddah. The video, which went viral on social media, shows the boy with head phones and wearing grey sweat shorts, a striped T-shirt and neon green and yellow Crocs on his feet. He is swaying his hips and arms to the 90s hit song “Macarena,” and appears to be smiling and giggling throughout the dance The state-linked Sabq news website quoted Col. Aati bin Attiyah al-Qurashi as saying police arrested the young man and were preparing to refer him to prosecutors for disrupting traffic. Western music and dancing is taboo in Saudi Arabia but such incidents in the past have not necessarily led to lengthy imprisonment or serious punishment. Source: www.apnews.com 

UTRECHT, Netherlands (AP) — Els van der Heijden, who has cystic fibrosis, was finding it ever harder to breathe as her lungs filled with thick, sticky mucus. Despite taking more than a dozen pills and inhalers a day, the 53-year-old had to stop working and scale back doing the thing she loved best, horseback riding. Doctors saw no sense in trying an expensive new drug because it hasn’t been proven to work in people with the rare type of cystic fibrosis that van der Heijden had. Instead, they scraped a few cells from van der Heijden and used them to grow a mini version of her large intestine in a petri dish. When van der Heijden’s “mini gut” responded to treatment, doctors knew it would help her too. “I really felt, physically, like a different person,” van der Heijden said after taking a drug — and getting back in the saddle. This experiment to help people with rare forms of cystic fibrosis in the Netherlands aims to grow mini intestines for every Dutch patient with the di...