Officials: Instructor started false reports of shooting at USC

October 3, 2017 at 12:00a.m.

LOS ANGELES

School officials said false reports of a shooting at the University of California were spawned by a faculty member telling her students during class that there was an active shooter in the building.

USC Department of Public Safety chief John Thomas said Los Angeles police are questioning the woman. Authorities did not say why she may have made the statement.

The campus went on lockdown as the shooting reports came in about 12:30 p.m. Monday.

Police gave the all-clear less than an hour later.

Officials: US to ask Cuba to cut embassy staff

WASHINGTON

The Trump administration is preparing to ask Cuba to withdraw 60 percent of its diplomats from Washington, U.S. officials said Monday, in response to last week’s U.S. move to cut its own embassy staff in Havana by a similar amount.

The U.S. request marks yet another major setback for relations between the United States and Cuba, two countries that only recently renewed diplomatic relations after a half-century of hostility. It comes as the U.S. seeks to protect its own diplomats from unexplained attacks that have harmed at least 21 Americans in Havana with ailments that affected their hearing, cognition, balance and vision.

Bodyguard gives harrowing account of Benghazi attack

WASHINGTON

A diplomatic security agent testified Monday that after militants stormed the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, he turned to U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was hiding in a safe room, and said, “When I die, you need to pick up my gun and keep fighting.”

Agent Scott Wickland was the government’s first witness in a trial of Ahmed Abu Khattala, a Libyan suspected of orchestrating the attack that killed the ambassador and three other Americans. Wickland took the stand and gave a harrowing account of how he tried without success to save the ambassador and Sean Patrick Smith, a State Department information management officer.

Poll: Americans want local leaders to fight warming

WASHINGTON

Americans want their local officials to take on the challenge of battling global warming now that President Donald Trump is withdrawing the nation from an international climate change agreement.

That’s according to a new poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. The poll finds 57 percent of Americans say they favor local governments picking up the slack to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions on their own, with only 10 percent opposing it. About 55 percent of Americans say their own local and state governments should be doing more to address global warming, with only 10 percent saying they should be doing less.

And more Americans oppose than favor Trump’s effort to pull the U.S. out of the 2015 Paris accord, in which nearly 200 nations agreed to self-imposed cuts or limits on emissions of heat-trapping gas pollution. Forty-two percent of those surveyed said they oppose getting out of the Paris agreement, while 28 percent favored the withdrawal and 28 percent had no strong opinion.

Associated Press