CHICAGO – Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert is due to report by Wednesday afternoon to a federal prison in southeastern Minnesota that has held other disgraced VIPs, including a former congressional colleague and a televangelist.
Starting his 15-month sentence in a hush-money case caps an already epic fall from being second in line to the presidency to an admitted child molester. Prosecutors say the 74-year-old Republican sexually abused at least four boys when he coached high school wrestling.
The nation’s longest-serving GOP speaker will be known as Inmate No. 47991-424 and becomes one of the highest-ranking U.S. politicians to ever do prison time.
DES MOINES, Iowa – A Republican congressman is trying to block the Treasury from redesigning U.S. currency, a move that could prevent the government from replacing Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill with abolitionist Harriet Tubman.
Rep. Steve King of Iowa has offered an amendment to a spending bill barring the use of funds to redesign any Federal Reserve note or coin. It wasn’t immediately clear why King opposed the redesign, and his office did not immediately respond to messages.
Under plans announced in April by Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill. The abolitionist and former slave who was a leader of the Underground Railroad will become the first African-American featured on U.S. paper currency and the first woman on paper currency in a century.
California’s last nuclear power plant will close by 2025 under an accord announced Tuesday, ending three decades of safety debates that helped fuel the national anti-nuclear power movement.
The state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., and environmental groups reached an agreement to replace production at Diablo Canyon nuclear plant with solar power and other energy sources that do not produce climate-changing greenhouse gases.
The facility, which sits along a bluff on California’s central coast, supplies 9 percent of the state’s power.
BAGHDAD – Only a third of Fallujah has been “cleared” of Islamic State militants, the U.S.-led coalition said Tuesday, days after the Iraqi government declared victory in the city west of Baghdad, which was held by the extremists for more than two years.
Other parts of the city are “contested,” said U.S. Army Col. Christopher Garver, the Baghdad-based spokesman for the coalition, with clashes underway between Iraqi forces and ISIS fighters. Most of the cleared terrain is in the south of the city and “clearing operations continue outward from the city center,” Garver added.
Iraqi forces pushed into the center of Fallujah on Friday, retaking a government complex and the central hospital.
LOS ANGELES – Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant testified Tuesday that his memory of encounters more than 40 years ago is dim, though his recollection of the creation of the band’s epic “Stairway to Heaven” was quite clear.
Plant told a packed courtroom that he did not remember hanging out with members of the band Spirit after a Birmingham, England, show in 1970, though he said he and his wife were in a bad car wreck and he has no memory of the evening.
“I don’t have a recollection of almost anyone I’ve hung out with,” Plant said as the courtroom roared with laughter.
Plant took the stand in a federal courtroom in Los Angeles during the copyright trial in which he and fellow songwriter Jimmy Page are accused of stealing a riff from Spirit’s song, “Taurus” for “Stairway to Heaven.”
The estate of the late songwriter Randy Wolfe, also known as Randy California, is suing Page, Plant and their record label for copyright infringement.
Plant had a much sharper memory of creating “Stairway” at Headley Grange in England, where he said his goal was to evoke an image of pastoral Britain.
CAIRO – An Egyptian court on Tuesday struck down an agreement to transfer two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia, delivering a rare rebuke to President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi’s government over a decision that sparked the biggest street protests of his two-year rule.
The government, which is appealing the ruling, insists the islands always belonged to Saudi Arabia, which has provided billions of dollars in aid to Egypt since el-Sissi led the military’s 2013 ouster of the Islamist Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president.
Critics of the border agreement, which was announced during a high-profile visit by King Salman alongside billions of dollars in new Saudi aid, view it as a sell-off of sovereign territory. Thousands of protesters took to the streets in April in the largest demonstrations since el-Sissi was elected president in 2014.
Associated Press
