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

Trump’s on a hot streak: Court rulings, vacancy, summit plan

WASHINGTON (AP) — A Supreme Court vacancy just fell in his lap, offering a chance to shape the court for decades. The current court handed him two favourable rulings in a single week. And there’s a Russia summit on the horizon, promising headlines for a week or more. President Donald Trump is enjoying quite a hot streak.

Some of the good news is not of his making. Still, a series of welcome events has given the president a reprieve from images of migrant children being separated from their families at the border, as well as negative headlines about administrative chaos implementing his hardline immigration policies.

Trump sought to keep the good vibes going Friday with an event marking the six-month anniversary of his tax cuts.

“We are bringing back our beautiful American dreams,” Trump declared, as he used a celebratory East Room event with top aides and business owners to showcase the $1.5 trillion tax package passed last December.

He called recent growth an “economic miracle,” though there’s credit to be shared: Lower unemployment, fewer claims for jobless benefits and many other positive economic indicators reflect the slow and steady nine-year recovery that began under President Barack Obama.

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US lawyers: Ruling allows detention of immigrant families

PHOENIX (AP) — The Trump administration says a ruling this week by a federal judge in San Diego requiring the government to reunify families separated at the border means authorities can legally keep families detained until their cases are complete.

The interpretation means immigrant families could spend months or even years in detention — even those seeking asylum — because of a years-long backlog in immigration court.

The Justice Department has said cases in which immigrants remain detained move through the system quicker than if they are released, but the backlog is still thousands of cases deep.

The Department of Justice said in a court filing Friday that a case known as the Flores agreement allows the government to detain families now that the California judge has barred their separation.

“The Trump Administration has been engaged — since January of 2017 —in restoring order to the lawlessness at the Southwest border and protecting our nation’s citizens, but we are beholden to a broken immigration system that Congress has refused to fix and that courts have exacerbated,” the department said in a news release.

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Grief in small town: March honours victims of newsroom attack

ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) — Quietly clutching candles or hoisting #AnnapolisStrong signs, more than 1,000 people streamed through Maryland’s capital, remembering five people slain in a newspaper office not just as gatekeepers of the news but as a crucial piece of their tight-knit community.

Friends, former co-workers and people who felt connected to the victims took part in a strikingly silent candlelit march Friday night to honour the employees of The Capital newspaper who were killed a day earlier in one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in U.S. history.

Melissa Wilson, who came to the vigil with her husband, Benjamin, their 9-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son, said many Annapolis residents have “one degree of separation” from at least one victim.

“The people who made our newspaper are people we felt we knew, even if we had never met them before,” Benjamin Wilson said.

Melissa Wilson’s employer has offices in the same building as the newspaper and her co-workers were there when a gunman methodically blasted his way through the newsroom with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun.

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Trump says he’ll bring up election meddling with Putin

MORRISTOWN, N.J. (AP) — President Donald Trump said Friday he plans to bring up Russian election meddling during his upcoming summit with Vladimir Putin, part of a wide-ranging list of topics that could include sanctions and the status of Crimea.

Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he planned to discuss Ukraine, Syria and Crimea as well as election interference when he meets with the Russian president in Helsinki, Finland, next month in a summit he said could help defuse tensions between Moscow and Washington.

“We’ll be talking about elections. We don’t want anybody tampering with elections,” Trump said. The president has repeatedly minimized the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia meddled in the 2016 election to help him win.

He tweeted Thursday, “Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!” And he has called the FBI’s investigation into potential Russian co-ordination with his campaign a “witch hunt” designed to delegitimize his presidency.

Trump was noncommittal when asked if he might lift sanctions imposed on Russia, telling reporters: “We’ll see what Russia does. We’re going to be talking to Russia about a lot of things. We’re going to be talking to them about Syria, we’re going to be talking to them about Ukraine. We might even be talking about some of the things President Obama lost, like Crimea, that could come up.”

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Canada announces billions in retaliatory tariffs against US

TORONTO (AP) — Canada announced billions of dollars in retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. on Friday in a tit-for-tat response to the Trump administration’s duties on Canadian steel and aluminum.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government released the final list of items that will be targeted beginning July 1. Some items will be subject to taxes of 10 or 25 per cent.

Trudeau and U.S. President Donald Trump spoke late Friday.

“As he has said in past conversations and in public, the Prime Minister conveyed that Canada has had no choice but to announce reciprocal countermeasures to the steel and aluminum tariffs that the United States imposed on June 1, 2018,” Trudeau’s office said in a statement.

“The two leaders agreed to stay in close touch on a way forward.”

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In song and prayer, Thais show solidarity with missing boys

MAE SAI, Thailand (AP) — It’s a simple melody sung to the plucking of acoustic guitars by schoolchildren sitting around candles: “I beg the skies to show mercy and empathy/ My brothers are in Tham Luang Khun Nang Non/ Let them pass this danger, I beg.”

The song is dedicated to events unfolding in a flooded mountain cave in northern Thailand, where 12 boys aged 11-16 and their soccer coach disappeared a week ago. It was written and performed by students at Lek Nai Tung Kwang school across the kingdom in Buriram province.

The music video has played on national newscasts during round-the-clock coverage of the search and rescue operation at the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in far northern Chiang Rai province. It is part of an outpouring of hope, empathy and concern across the Southeast Asian nation for the boys, their families and the army of people working to bring them home.

“We’re worried. Everybody wants to hear good news,” said Keeta Wariburee, a teacher at the school that produced the video. “We want to help them, but if we went up there we’d probably just get in the way. So we’re doing what we can by sending encouragement.”

Rescuers including elite Thai navy divers, a U.S. military team and British cave experts have been frustrated by incessant rain that has flooded the cave and made locating the boys more difficult. Despite efforts to drain the water, muddy floodwaters reached near the entrance of the cave while rescuers kept trying to find hidden shafts in the green mountainside to access the cavern. In a desperate move, officials dropped into the shafts care packages stuffed with food, beverages, a phone, a flashlight, candles, a lighter and a map of the cave.

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Trump pledges July 9 announcement on Supreme Court nominee

MORRISTOWN, N.J. (AP) — Powering forward with a decision that could reshape the Supreme Court for decades, President Donald Trump said Friday he will announce his choice to succeed retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy on July 9. He added that two women are among his top candidates for the job.

The president, who spoke aboard Air Force One on the way to his golf club in New Jersey, said he had identified a group of at least five potential candidates for the nation’s high court and he may interview as many as seven.

“It’s a great group of intellectual talent,” Trump said.

Kennedy, a key swing vote on the court, announced Wednesday that he would retire this summer. Kennedy’s news that he’ll leave the court next month immediately activated a network of White House aides, congressional allies and outside advocates, all set for their second Supreme Court confirmation fight in two years.

Trump told reporters he planned to begin interviewing possible candidates Monday but he may meet with some over the weekend in New Jersey. Asked if he planned to question potential court nominees their views on abortion rights and Roe v. Wade, he responded, “That’s not a question I’ll be asking.”

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Survivors describe carnage at Florida high school massacre

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Students and teachers who survived a Florida high school massacre told investigators how they watched classmates die, had bullets whiz past them and huddled in fear until they were rescued by police, in some of the most dramatic records released so far from the mass shooting.

Prosecutors released the statements Friday from the Feb. 14 shooting Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where a gunman killed 17 people. The redacted statements are the latest evidence released under Florida law that makes it a public record when it is turned over to defence attorneys.

Students and teachers described classmates being shot and dying in front of them, and bullets shattering glass, destroying computers and slamming into walls. They talked of hiding in terror until they were rescued and then walking over dead bodies as police evacuated them from the building. Others described watching in puzzlement as the 19-year-old suspect Nickolas Cruz walked past among evacuating students, knowing he had been kicked out of Stoneman Douglas a year earlier, and troubling and racist encounters they’d had with him before the shooting.

These are some of their stories. Some student names in the report are redacted and others are not, but The Associated Press is not naming any students as they are juveniles.

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Bear cub with burnt paws rescued from Colorado wildfire

DURANGO, Colo. (AP) — An orphaned bear cub suffered painful burns to her paws in one of the half-dozen significant wildfires scorching Colorado, but she is being nursed back to health, state officials said Friday.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers believe the bear will recover well enough to be released this winter.

“When the bear was brought in, I wasn’t sure if it was going to make it,” Michael Sirochman said, a Parks and Wildlife veterinary technician. “But she’s responding very well to treatment, and by winter we believe we’ll be able to return her to the wild.”

It was an encouraging bit of news amid an extreme drought and an outbreak of disruptive wildfires in Colorado and much of the Southwestern U.S.

The wildfire that injured the cub has burned 65 square miles (168 square kilometres) near Durango in the southwestern corner of the state. More than 2,000 homes were evacuated at one point, but those residents were allowed to return.

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Month after diss track, Drake emerges unfazed with new album

NEW YORK (AP) — A month ago, Drake’s world was crumbling.

Now, he’s untouchable.

Pusha T’s infamous diss track — where he was in full investigative journalist mode, divulging new information about Drake while also shading his mother, father and bestie — hit Drake hard. Drake’s reply — well, lack thereof, marked a low for the rapper-singer, who had surprised music fans when he won his rap beef with Meek Mill in 2015.

But Drake, who has been criticized by some as too commercial and too soft, is back on top seemingly unfazed. And those fans who enjoyed the revelations in Pusha T’s “The Story of Adidon” are likely listening to “Scorpion,” the highly anticipated, 25-track album by pop music’s No. 1 player released Friday.

“It’s not going to hurt him,” Carl Chery, Spotify’s creative director for urban music, said of the diss track. “If Drake comes out with his new single, you’re not going to listen to it? Everyone is going to run and play it. And it’s going to become an Instagram caption.”