North America

SAN SALVADOR, Jan 28 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei offered his Salvadoran counterpart, Nayib Bukele, the opportunity to build and operate a port in Guatemalan waters in the Atlantic Ocean to promote commerce.

Giammattei, who took office in January, said the governments will work to develop a legal framework so that El Salvador can develop projects through a public-private partnership on the Guatemalan coast.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. military on Monday confirmed that a U.S. Air Force aircraft crashed in Afghanistan earlier in the day.

David Goldfein, chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, reportedly said that an Air Force E-11A Battlefield Airborne Communications Node aircraft went down in territory currently under the Taliban control in Afghanistan while attending an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington-based think tank.

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 27 (Xinhua) -- San Francisco Mayor London Breed slammed the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday for issuing an order allowing the federal government to implement a policy that threatens to deny immigrants permanent residency in the country.

The court ruled in a 5-4 decision that President Donald Trump's administration could temporarily implement the so-called "public charge" rule that would ban immigrants from using public benefits, including food stamps, Medicaid, housing or permanent residency, also known as a "green card."

WOODLAND, Calif. (AP) — A California father about to be freed from prison has been taken into custody in connection with the decades-old killings of five of his infant children in a case a sheriff said has haunted his agency for years.

Paul Perez, 57, a convicted sex offender with a 20-year criminal history, was charged in the deaths of the children born between 1992 and 2001, authorities announced Monday, the same day he was supposed to be released from a state prison in Delano on unrelated charges.

CALABASAS, Calif. (AP) — A veteran pilot who plunged into a Los Angeles-area hillside, killing Kobe Bryant and eight others, had tried to avoid fog so heavy that it had grounded police choppers, authorities said.

But even experienced pilots may have only seconds to act when they are blinded by weather, an expert said as investigators began scouring the wreckage for clues to Sunday morning’s crash.

The NBA postponed the Los Angeles Lakers’ next game against the Clippers on Tuesday night after the deaths of the retired superstar and the other victims.

NEW YORK (AP) — Britain’s Prince Andrew has provided “zero cooperation” to the American investigators who want to interview him as part of their sex trafficking probe into Jeffrey Epstein, a U.S. prosecutor said Monday.

Speaking at a news conference outside Epstein’s New York mansion, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said prosecutors and the FBI had contacted Andrew’s lawyers and asked to interview him.

“To date, Prince Andrew has provided zero cooperation,” said Berman, the top federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

MIAMI (AP) — An ally of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has hired a Washington lobbyist whose business has boomed under the Trump administration as part of a $12.5 million effort to ease sanctions and reset bilateral relations as the U.S.-backed campaign to oust the socialist leader stalls.

The Maduro government’s top lawyer, Inspector General Reinaldo Muñoz, hired lobbyist Robert Stryk’s Sonoran Policy Group as part of a larger contract he signed with Foley & Lardner, a law firm with offices in Washington.

SCOTTSBORO, Ala. (AP) — A massive fire that killed at least eight people and destroyed dozens of boats in an Alabama marina early Monday was spread so rapidly by the wind that “we didn’t have time to do nothing,” said one resident who survived but lost his brother in the cold water.

Tommy Jones, a Jackson County Park Marina resident, said he also watched helplessly as a small boat containing a woman and her children was engulfed in flames.

“There was nothing we could do,” he said.

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump stated falsely Monday that House Democrats never called his former national security adviser to testify in their impeachment inquiry. Actually they did.

Trump’s tweet about John Bolton came as the Senate entered the second week of the impeachment trial, where his defense team stretched the facts on Trump’s effort to get Ukraine to investigate Democrats.

WASHINGTON (AP) — A single paper copy in a nondescript envelope arrived at the White House on Dec. 30. Four weeks later, news of John Bolton’s book manuscript about his time as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser has exploded into public view, sending a jolt through the president’s impeachment trial.

The book contains an account of an August conversation in which Bolton says Trump told him that he wanted to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in security aid from Ukraine until it helped him with investigations into political rival Joe Biden.