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

Kim Potter guilty of manslaughter in Daunte Wright’s death

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A suburban Minneapolis police officer who said she confused her handgun for her Taser was convicted of manslaughter Thursday in the death of Daunte Wright, prompting tears from the young Black man’s parents and a jubilant celebration by supporters outside the courthouse who chanted “Guilty, guilty, guilty!”

The mostly white jury deliberated for about 27 hours over four days before finding former Brooklyn Center Officer Kim Potter guilty of first-degree and second-degree manslaughter. Potter, 49, faces about seven years in prison under the state’s sentencing guidelines, but prosecutors said they would seek a longer term.

Judge Regina Chu ordered Potter taken into custody and held without bail pending sentencing on Feb. 18. Potter had been free on $100,000 bond posted the day last April that she was charged, which was three days after she killed Wright and a day after she quit the police force.

As she was led away in handcuffs, a Potter family member in the courtroom shouted “Love you, Kim!” Potter’s attorneys left the courthouse without commenting and didn’t immediately respond to phone messages or emails.

It was the second high-profile conviction of a police officer won this year by a team led by Attorney General Keith Ellison, including some of the same attorneys who helped convict Derek Chauvin in George Floyd’s death in the very same courtroom just eight months earlier.

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EXPLAINER: What was Potter charged with in Wright death?

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — A white suburban Minneapolis police officer has been found guilty of first-degree and second-degree manslaughter in the death of Daunte Wright, a Black man.

Kim Potter said she meant to use her Taser to try to stop the 20-year-old Wright from fleeing during an April 11 traffic stop but accidentally grabbed her gun instead.

Here’s a look at the charges and potential penalties:

THE CHARGES

First-degree manslaughter in this case means prosecutors alleged that Potter caused Wright’s death while committing a misdemeanor — the “reckless handling or use of a firearm so as to endanger the safety of another with such force and violence that death or great bodily harm to any person was reasonably foreseeable.”

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SKorea ex-President Park, jailed for corruption, is pardoned

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The South Korean government said Friday it will grant a special pardon to former President Park Geun-hye, who is serving a lengthy prison term for bribery and other crimes.

The Justice Ministry said in a statement that Park’s pardon is aimed at overcoming past divisions and promoting national unity in the face of difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The ministry said the 69-year-old Park was among 3,094 people who are to be pardoned on Dec. 31.

“We should move into a new era by getting over the pains of the past. It’s time to boldly pull together all our strengths for the future rather than fighting against each other while being preoccupied with the past,” President Moon Jae-in said in a statement.

“In the case of former President Park, we considered the fact that her health condition has deteriorated a lot after serving nearly five years in prison,” he said.

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LA police kill teen girl while firing shots at male suspect

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Los Angeles police fatally shot a 14-year-old girl who was inside a clothing store dressing room Thursday as they fired at a suspect who had assaulted a woman earlier, authorities said.

Police also killed the male suspect, authorities said. He and the girl have not been named. The woman who had been assaulted was taken to the hospital with moderate to serious injuries.

The shots were fired around 11:45 a.m. at a Burlington store — part of a chain formerly known as Burlington Coat Factory — in the North Hollywood area of the San Fernando Valley.

Police initially responded to reports of a person being assaulted with a deadly weapon as well as reports of shots being fired, said Los Angeles police Capt. Stacy Spell at a news conference. Spell said officers opened fire when they saw the suspect assaulting another person.

The suspect was struck by the officers’ bullets and killed, Spell said.

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To grandmother’s house or no? Omicron disrupts holiday plans

Dave Fravel and his wife invited several relatives to their Cape Cod home for Christmas to share food, gifts and the togetherness they’ve longed for during the lonely days of the pandemic. They were also looking forward to a holiday sightseeing trip to New York City.

But the coronavirus spoiled all those plans. With cases surging in their state of Massachusetts and the super-infectious omicron variant racing around the world, they feared spreading the virus even before Fravel’s 18-year-old son, Colin, came down with COVID-19.

Rich England has been there before. In the summer, when the delta variant was surging, he said no to a Christmastime vacation with his parents and sister’s family to London and Scotland. But he, his wife and 2-year-old daughter are keeping plans for a four-day trip from their home in Alexandria, Virginia, to Miami on Dec. 31.

“The safest thing to do would be to say ‘OMG, we have to cancel,’” he said. “But there’s a lot of letters in the Greek alphabet — there’s going to be variants after omicron. You can’t just respond to every single variant by shutting down.”

For the second year in a row, the ever-morphing virus presents would-be revelers with a difficult choice: cancel holiday gatherings and trips or figure out ways to forge ahead as safely as possible. Many health experts are begging people not to let down their guard.

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Jury in Elizabeth Holmes trial hears replay of her boasts

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — Jurors in the fraud trial of former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes returned to the courtroom Thursday to listen again to audio recordings that captured Holmes’ brash promises about vaunted blood-testing technology that propelled her meteoric rise and scandalous downfall.

In those recordings from a December 2013 presentation to prospective investors, Holmes bragged about partnerships with established drug companies that hadn’t panned out and potential U.S. military contracts that never materialized because of problems with Theranos’ technology. She was unaware she was being recorded at the time.

The jurors previously heard the recordingsin late October and a few excerpts in closing arguments last week. They sent a note before noon asking to review them, prompting U.S. District Judge Edward Davila to bring the eight men and four women of the jury back to the courtroom for the first time since they were ushered outat the end of last week to begin deliberations.

Holmes, 37, returned to the courtroom too, and intently watched the jurors and their reactions to the recordings from her usual seat in the courtroom. She seemed to try to make eye contacts with the jurors when as they walked out of the courtroom following the audio replay, but none appeared to return her gaze.

In the recordings, Holmes boasts about how Theranos would “change the reality of lab testing” and bring down health costs so dramatically that it would save Medicaid and Medicare about $150 billion over a decade. But she didn’t say how long that would take to happen.

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Texas board withdraws pardon recommendation for George Floyd

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — A Texas board that had unanimously supported a posthumous pardon for George Floyd over a 2004 drug arrest in Houston backpedaled in an announcement Thursday, saying “procedural errors” were found in their recommendation months after leaving the decision to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

The unusual reversal was announced by Abbott’s office two days before Christmas, around the time he typically doles out his annual pardons.

The withdrawn endorsement was met with outrage from a public defender who submitted the pardon application for Floyd, who spent much of his life in Houston before his death in 2020 under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer. Allison Mathis, an attorney in Houston, accused the two-term governor of playing politics ahead of Texas’ March GOP primary elections as he faces challengers from the far right.

Floyd’s name was withdrawn along with two dozen other clemency recommendations that had been submitted by the Texas Board of Pardon and Paroles. In a letter dated Dec. 16 but not released publicly until now, the board told Abbott that it had identified “unexplained departures” from its process of issuing pardons and needed to reconsider more than a third of the 67 clemency recommendations it sent to Abbott this year, including the one for Floyd.

In October, the board had unanimously recommended that Floyd become just the second person in Texas since 2010 to receive a posthumous pardon from the governor.

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Putin to the West: ‘It is not us who threaten anyone’

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin urged the West on Thursday to “immediately” meet Russia’s demand for security guarantees precluding NATO’s expansion to Ukraine, saying the U.S. is “on the threshold of our home.”

Speaking during a marathon annual news conference, the Russian leader welcomed talks with the U.S., which he said are set to start in Geneva next month, as a “positive” move, but warned that Moscow expects the discussion to produce quick results.

“We have clearly and precisely let them know that any further NATO expansion eastward is unacceptable,” Putin said.

Last week, Moscow submitted draft security documents demanding that NATO deny membership to Ukraine and other former Soviet countries and roll back the alliance’s military deployments in Central and Eastern Europe. A key principle of the alliance is that membership is open to any qualifying country.

“Is it us who are putting missiles near the U.S. borders?” Putin said angrily. “No, it’s the U.S. who came to our home with its missiles, it’s already on the threshold of our home. Is it some excessive demand not to place any strike weapons systems near our home?”

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AP Exclusive: Polish opposition senator hacked with spyware

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish Sen. Krzysztof Brejza’s mobile phone was hacked with sophisticated spyware nearly three dozen times in 2019 when he was running the opposition’s campaign against the right-wing populist government in parliamentary elections, an internet watchdog found.

Text messages stolen from Brejza’s phone — then doctored in a smear campaign — were aired by state-controlled TV in the heat of that race, which the ruling party narrowly won. With the hacking revelation, Brejza now questions whether the election was fair.

It’s the third finding by the University of Toronto’s nonprofit Citizen Lab that a Polish opposition figure was hacked with Pegasus spyware from the Israeli hacking tools firm NSO Group. Brejza’s phone was digitally broken in to 33 times from April 26, 2019, to Oct. 23, 2019, said Citizen Lab researchers, who have been tracking government abuses of NSO malware for years.

The other two hacks were identified earlier this week after a joint Citizen Lab-Associated Press investigation. All three victims blame Poland’s government, which has refused to confirm or deny whether it ordered the hacks or is a client of NSO Group. State security services spokesman Stanislaw Zaryn insisted Thursday that the government does not wiretap illegally and obtains court orders in “justified cases.” He said any suggestions the Polish government surveils for political ends were false.

NSO, which was blacklisted by the U.S. government last month, says it only sells its spyware to legitimate government law enforcement and intelligence agencies vetted by Israel’s Defense Ministry for use against terrorists and criminals. It does not name its clients and would not say if Poland is among them.

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Officials question San Francisco’s emergency over opioids

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The Board of Supervisors in San Francisco were meeting Thursday to consider an emergency order requested by the mayor to tackle the opioid epidemic in the city’s troubled Tenderloin neighborhood, with some members clearly dismayed that the declaration could be used to criminalize people who are homeless, addicted to drugs or both.

The public health emergency declaration allows the Department of Emergency Management to re-allocate city staff and bypass contracting and permitting regulations to set up a new temporary center where people can access expanded drug treatment and counseling.

But advocates for the homeless and substance users are urging a no vote because Mayor London Breed has also pledged to flood the district with police officers to halt crime. Public health officials encourage treatment for drug addicts, not punishment, but Breed has said that people consuming drugs in public may wind up in jail unless they accept services.

Supervisors said they welcomed the idea of treating a drug epidemic fueled by cheap synthetic fentanyl as the crisis it is. More people in San Francisco died of overdose last year than of COVID-19.

“I believe that we should all be marshaling every resource we have in this city to address that crisis,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen. “But because of the way that this has been described in the media, I don’t have faith that we’re talking about the same thing.”