AP News in Brief at 11:04 p.m. EDT

Jury deliberates death penalty in Chinese scholar’s slaying

PEORIA, Ill. (AP) — Jurors began deliberating but didn’t reach a decision Wednesday on whether a former University of Illinois doctoral student should be put to death for the brutal slaying of a scholar from China he abducted at a bus stop.

Brent Christensen’s attorney, Elisabeth Pollock, teared up earlier in the day during closing arguments in the penalty phase in U.S. District Court in Peoria, at one point walking behind her 30-year-old client and putting her hands on his shoulders.

“He is a whole person,” she said, looking across the room at jurors. “He is not just the worst thing he ever did.”

Pollock sought to humanize Christensen, telling jurors how he once bought a stuffed toy his sister wanted using his allowance money.

Prosecutors reminded jurors of a secret FBI recording in which Christensen laughed as he described luring 26-year-old Yingying Zhang into his car as she was running late to sign an apartment lease in 2017. He raped, choked and stabbed her as she fought back, then beat her to death with a bat and cut off her head. Her body was never found.

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Trump slams congresswomen; crowd roars, ‘Send her back!’

GREENVILLE, N.C. (AP) — Going after four Democratic congresswomen one by one, a combative President Donald Trump turned his campaign rally Wednesday into an extended dissection of the liberal views of the women of colour, deriding them for what he painted as extreme positions and suggesting they just get out.

“Tonight I have a suggestion for the hate-filled extremists who are constantly trying to tear our country down,” Trump told the crowd in North Carolina, a swing state he won in 2016 and wants to claim again in 2020. “They never have anything good to say. That’s why I say, ‘Hey if you don’t like it, let ’em leave, let ’em leave.’”

Eager to rile up his base with the some of the same kind of rhetoric he targeted at minorities and women in 2016, Trump declared, “I think in some cases they hate our country.”

Trump’s jabs were aimed at the self-described “squad” of four freshmen Democrats who have garnered attention since their arrival in January for their outspoken liberal views and distaste for Trump: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. All were born in the U.S. except for Omar, who came to the U.S. as a child after fleeing Somalia with her family.

Taking the legislators on one at a time, Trump ticked through a laundry list of what he deemed offensive comments by each woman, mangling and misconstruing many facts along the way.

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Asylum ban may further strain immigrant detention facilities

SAN DIEGO (AP) — A new policy to deny asylum to anyone who shows up on the Mexican border after travelling through another country threatens to exacerbate overcrowding at severely strained U.S. immigration detention centres and makeshift holding areas.

Photos and video of Vice-President Mike Pence’s visit Friday to McAllen, Texas, showing men crammed behind chain-link fences offered the latest glimpse into squalid conditions at Customs and Border Protection facilities. Women are being held in smaller tents at the station.

The Border Patrol housed 900 people in an area with capacity for 125 in El Paso, Texas, according to a Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog report on an unannounced visit in May. Inspectors saw detainees standing on toilets to gain breathing space. Agents described detainees being held in standing-room-only cells for weeks.

A sharp drop in illegal border crossings, coming during a seasonal decline as summer heat sets in, has eased pressure temporarily. The Border Patrol has fewer than 10,000 people in custody, down from 19,000 in May, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to share the figures publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, the busiest corridor for illegal crossings, was the only one of nine sectors on the Mexican border over capacity on Wednesday, with about 6,000 detainees, the official said. El Paso has plummeted to 500 detainees.

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US heat wave just warming up for long and scorching weekend

DETROIT (AP) — The heat wave that has been roasting much of the U.S. in recent days is just getting warmed up, with temperatures expected to soar to dangerous levels through the weekend.

Communities are preparing by offering buildings as cooling centres and asking residents to check in on relatives and neighbours. Officials also are concerned about smog, which is exacerbated by the heat and makes it more difficult for certain people to breathe, including the very young, the elderly and people with asthma or lung diseases.

More than 100 local heat records are expected to fall Saturday, according to the National Weather Service. Most won’t be record-daily highs but record-high nighttime lows, and that lack of cooling can be dangerous, meteorologists say. Temperatures in parts of the East won’t drop below the mid- to upper-70s or even 80 degrees (26.7 Celsius) at night, he said.

The heat wave will likely be “short and searing,” said Greg Carbin, forecast branch chief for the weather service’s Weather Prediction Center.

A high pressure system stretching from coast-to-coast is keeping the heat turned on. The heat and humidity are made to feel worse by the large amount of moisture in the air coming from the Gulf of Mexico, much of it left over from Hurricane Barry.

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Trump vs. Dems: ‘Racist,’ ‘socialist’ lines drawn for 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — With tweets and a vote, President Donald Trump and House Democrats established the sharp and emotionally raw contours of the 2020 election campaigns.

In the process, they have created a fraught political frame: “racists” vs. “socialists.”

Trump’s aggressive condemnation of women of colour in Congress has allowed House Democrats to mend, for now, their own political divisions as they put the president on record with a resolution condemning his words as racist.

But by pushing the House majority into the arms of the squad of liberal freshman women, Trump also adds to his narrative that Democrats have a “socialist” agenda, a story line he started to bring into focus during his State of the Union address.

Political triumphs are being claimed on all sides. Yet it’s unclear whether either approach is what’s needed to sway independent-minded voters who typically determine congressional and presidential elections. And at a time when polling shows Americans sense a worsening of racial attitudes, the searing attacks along Pennsylvania Avenue are tapping potentially explosive emotions.

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Prosecutors drop groping case against Kevin Spacey

BOSTON (AP) — Prosecutors dropped a case Wednesday accusing Kevin Spacey of groping a young man at a resort island bar in 2016 after the accuser refused to testify about a missing cellphone the defence says contains information supporting the actor’s claims of innocence.

Spacey was charged with indecent assault and battery last year in the only criminal case that has been brought against the actor since his career collapsed amid a slew of sexual misconduct allegations. The two-time Oscar winner was among the earliest and biggest names to be ensnared in the #MeToo movement against sexual assault and harassment that swept across the entertainment and other industries.

Spacey denies groping the man, whose mother first went public with the allegations in 2017.

A phone message seeking comment was left with Spacey’s lawyer.

The actor’s accuser was ordered to take the stand earlier this month after he said he lost the cellphone he used the night of the alleged groping. The defence said it needed the phone to recover deleted text messages it says would help Spacey’s case.

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House holds 2 Trump officials in contempt in census dispute

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Democratic-controlled House voted Wednesday to hold two top Trump administration officials in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with subpoenas related to a decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

The House voted, 230-198, to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in criminal contempt. The vote, a political blow to the Trump administration, is largely symbolic because the Justice Department is unlikely to prosecute the two men.

The action marks an escalation of Democratic efforts to use their House majority to aggressively investigate the inner workings of the Trump administration.

Four Democrats opposed the contempt measure: Reps. Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, Anthony Brindisi of New York, Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania and Jared Golden of Maine. All but Lamb are in their first term and all represent swing districts. Independent Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, a former Republican, supported the contempt measure.

President Donald Trump abandoned the citizenship question last week after the Supreme Court said the administration’s justification for the question “seems to have been contrived .” Trump directed agencies to try to compile the information using existing databases.

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Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman sentenced to life in prison

NEW YORK (AP) — Mexican drug kingpin and escape artist Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was sentenced Wednesday to life behind bars in a U.S. prison, expressing no remorse over his conviction for a massive drug conspiracy that spread murder and mayhem for more than two decades.

Instead, a defiant Guzman took a parting shot at a judge in federal court in Brooklyn by accusing him of making a mockery of the U.S. justice system in refusing to order a new trial based on unsubstantiated allegations of juror misconduct.

“My case was stained and you denied me a fair trial when the whole world was watching,” Guzman said through an interpreter.

Experts say he will likely wind up at the federal government’s Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, where inmates are held alone for 23 hours a day and have little human interaction.

“Since the government will send me to a jail where my name will not ever be heard again, I take this opportunity to say there was no justice here,” he said.

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Number of US overdose deaths appears to be falling

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. overdose deaths last year likely fell for the first time in nearly three decades, preliminary numbers suggest.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday posted data showing nearly 68,000 drug overdose deaths were reported last year. The number may go up as more investigations are completed, but the agency expects the tally will end up below 69,000.

Overdose deaths had been climbing each year since 1990, topping 70,000 in 2017.

The numbers were celebrated by the U.S. secretary of health and human services. “Lives are being saved, and we’re beginning to win the fight against this crisis,” Alex Azar wrote in a tweet.

But the overdose death rate is still about seven times higher than it was a generation ago.

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Netflix’s 2Q dud rattles investors as competition heats up

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Netflix’s video streaming service suffered a dramatic slowdown in growth during its traditionally sluggish spring season, a drop-off coming as the company boosts its prices and girds for even stiffer competition.

The service picked up 2.7 million worldwide subscribers for the April-June period. That’s far below Netflix’s forecast of 5 million subscribers. The second-quarter letdown announced Wednesday comes after Netflix attracted nearly 10 million subscribers during the first three months of the year , more than any other quarter since the debut of its video streaming service 12 years ago.

The slowdown rattled investors already wondering how Netflix might fare against a new wave of competition coming this fall when both Walt Disney Co. and Apple plan to launch their own video streaming services.

After the second-quarter numbers came out, Netflix’s stock plunged 12% in extending trading. If that sell-off is replicated in Thursday’s regular trading session, it will be the largest decline in Netflix’s stock price in three years and wipe out $18 billion in shareholder wealth.

Netflix ended June with 151.6 million worldwide subscribers, far more than a current crop of video streaming rivals that includes as Amazon and Hulu.