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

Russians charged with meddling in 2016 presidential race

WASHINGTON (AP) — In an extraordinary indictment, the U.S. special counsel accused 13 Russians Friday of an elaborate plot to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, charging them with running a huge but hidden social media trolling campaign aimed in part at helping Republican Donald Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The federal indictment, brought by special counsel Robert Mueller, represents the most detailed allegations to date of illegal Russian meddling during the campaign that sent Trump to the White House. It also marks the first criminal charges against Russians believed to have secretly worked to influence the outcome.

The Russian organization was funded by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the indictment says. He is a wealthy St. Petersburg businessman with ties to the Russian government and President Vladimir Putin.

Trump quickly claimed vindication Friday, noting in a tweet that the alleged interference efforts began in 2014 — “long before I announced that I would run for President.”

“The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!” he tweeted.

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Failure to avert school shooting adds to pressure on FBI

WASHINGTON (AP) — The revelation that the FBI botched a potentially life-saving tip on the Florida school shooting suspect is a devastating blow to America’s top law enforcement agency at a time when it is already under extraordinary political pressure.

Even before the startling disclosure that the FBI failed to investigate a warning that the suspect, Nikolas Cruz, could be plotting an attack, the bureau was facing unprecedented criticism from President Donald Trump and other Republicans, who have accused it of partisan bias.

The agency and its supporters had been able to dismiss past criticism as just politics, but this time it had no option but to admit it made a disastrous mistake.

The FBI’s acknowledgment that it mishandled the tip prompted a sharp rebuke from its boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and a call from Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott, a Trump ally, for FBI Director Christopher Wray to resign.

Wray, on the job for just six months, had already been in a precarious position defending the bureau from relentless attacks by Trump and other Republicans. They are still dissatisfied with its decision not to charge Hillary Clinton with crimes related to her use of a private email server, and they see signs of bias in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of possible Trump campaign ties to Russia.

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Anger bubbles over at funerals for Florida shooting victims

PARKLAND, Fla. (AP) — As families began burying their dead, authorities questioned whether they could have prevented the attack on a South Florida high school where a gunman took the lives of 14 students, the athletic director, a coach and a geography teacher.

At funerals and in the streets of Parkland, a suburb on the edge of the Everglades, anger bubbled over at the senselessness of the shooting and at the widespread availability of guns. A rally to support gun-safety legislation was scheduled for Saturday at the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale.

During a funeral Friday for 18-year-old Meadow Pollack, her father looked down at his daughter’s plain pine coffin and screamed in anguish as Gov. Rick Scott and 1,000 others sat in Temple K’ol Tikvah.

“You killed my kid!” Andrew Pollack yelled, referring to Nikolas Cruz, who is accused of gunning down Meadow and 16 others. “My kid is dead. It goes through my head all day and all night. I keep hearing it. This is just unimaginable that I will never see my princess again.”

He briefly paused as mourners, punched by the rawness of his words, began to wail.

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Young shooting survivors stepped from school into gun debate

PARKLAND, Fla. (AP) — Dead bodies were still inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when survivors of this week’s shooting began speaking out about gun violence. It seemed as if the teens had stepped straight from the bullet-scarred school into the nation’s gun debate.

Rather than retreating back into their private lives, the young people who saw classmates slain at the desks next to them are fast becoming advocates for stronger weapons laws and a safer world.

David Hogg, a senior and news director at the high school, recorded video of Wednesday’s massacre as he huddled in a room with fellow students.

“Imagine hearing bullets … it’s absolutely awful,” Hogg said. “This is why people need to be politically active. This needs to be a turning point.”

In the aftermath of other shootings, many survivors try to heal in private and return as best they can to daily life. If there is an outcry for new gun legislation or better background checks, it often fades in days or weeks.

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Magnitude-7.2 earthquake slams south, central Mexico

MEXICO CITY (AP) — A powerful magnitude-7.2 earthquake shook south and central Mexico Friday, causing people to flee swaying buildings and office towers in the country’s capital, where residents were still jittery after a deadly quake five months ago.

Crowds gathered on Mexico City’s central Reforma Avenue as well as on streets in Oaxaca state’s capital, nearer the quake’s epicenter, which was in a rural area close to Mexico’s Pacific coast and the border with Guerrero state. There were no immediate reports of deaths.

“It was awful,” said Mercedes Rojas Huerta, 57, who was sitting on a bench outside her home in Mexico City’s trendy Condesa district, too frightened to go back inside. “It started to shake; the cars were going here and there. What do I do?”

She said she was still scared thinking of the Sept. 19 earthquake that caused 228 deaths in the capital and 141 more in nearby states. Many buildings in Mexico City are still damaged from that quake.

The U.S. Geological Survey originally put the magnitude of Friday’s quake at 7.5 but later lowered it to 7.2. It said the epicenter was 33 miles (53 kilometres) northeast of Pinotepa in southern Oaxaca state. It had a depth of 15 miles (24 kilometres).

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Lindsey Vonn’s opener, super-G, delayed because of wind

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea (AP) — Lindsey Vonn’s first race at the Pyeongchang Olympics is the latest to be delayed because of strong winds.

The start for the women’s super-G has been pushed back by an hour to Saturday at noon local time (Friday at 10 p.m. ET).

Vonn was drawn to be the first racer down the hill at Jeongseon Alpine Center.

She won a bronze in the super-G at the 2010 Vancouver Games, where she also won a gold medal in the downhill. The 33-year-old American missed the 2014 Sochi Olympics after surgery on her right knee.

Earlier in the week, the women’s giant slalom and the men’s downhill were rescheduled because of high winds.

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Shooting suspect was on school rifle team that got NRA grant

The troubled teen authorities say killed 17 people at a Florida high school excelled in an air-rifle marksmanship program supported by a grant from the National Rifle Association Foundation, part of a multimillion-dollar effort by the gun group to support youth shooting clubs and other programs.

Nikolas Cruz, 19, was wearing a maroon shirt with the logo from the Army Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School when he was arrested Wednesday shortly after the shooting. Former JROTC cadets told The Associated Press that Cruz was a member of the small varsity marksmanship team that trained together after class and travelled to other area schools to compete.

It was a close-knit group. One of the other cadets started calling Cruz “Wolf,” and the nickname stuck.

“He was a very good shot,” said Aaron Diener, 20, who gave Cruz a ride to shooting competitions when they were part of the same four-member team in 2016. “He had an AR-15 he talked about, and pistols he had shot. … He would tell us, ‘Oh, it was so fun to shoot this rifle’ or ‘It was so fun to shoot that.’ It seemed almost therapeutic to him, the way he spoke about it.”

The JROTC marksmanship program used air rifles special-made for target shooting, typically on indoor ranges at targets the size of a coin.

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Under fire, Kelly overhauls White House clearance procedure

NEW YORK (AP) — Under pressure over his handling of abuse allegations against a top aide, White House chief of staff John Kelly on Friday ordered sweeping changes in how the White House clears staff members to gain access to classified information, acknowledging that the administration “must do better” in how it handles security clearances.

Kelly issued a five-page memo that acknowledged White House mistakes but also put the onus on the FBI and the Justice Department to provide more timely updates on background investigations, asking that any significant derogatory information about staff members be quickly flagged to the White House counsel’s office.

The issue has been in the spotlight for more than a week after it was revealed that former staff secretary Rob Porter had an interim security clearance that allowed him access to classified material despite allegations of domestic violence by his two ex-wives.

“Now is the time to take a hard look at the way the White House processes clearance requests,” Kelly wrote in the memo. “We should — and in the future, must — do better.”

The memo said the FBI and Justice Department had offered increased co-operation and, going forward, all background investigations of top officers “should be flagged for the FBI at the outset and then hand-delivered to the White House Counsel personally upon completion. The FBI official who delivers these files should verbally brief the White House Counsel on any information in those files they deem to be significantly derogatory.”

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Magazine obtains ex-playmate’s notes on alleged Trump affair

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump had a nine-month extramarital affair with the 1998 Playboy Playmate of the year beginning in 2006, showing the woman his wife’s bedroom in Trump Tower and bringing her to his private bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, according to the woman’s eight-page, handwritten account of the relationship obtained by The New Yorker magazine.

The woman, Karen McDougal, confirmed in the story published online Friday that she wrote the account but said she was constrained in what else she could say publicly about Trump because she’d signed a confidentiality agreement.

The affair ended in part after McDougal started feeling guilty about it and after Trump made an offensive comment about her mother’s age as well as a vulgar remark about the anatomy of black men, the magazine reported.

The story said McDougal was paid $150,000 during the 2016 presidential campaign for the rights to her story of an affair with any “then-married man” by the supermarket tabloid National Enquirer, which never ran it.

Just before Election Day, The Wall Street Journal reported that the tabloid, whose publisher, David Pecker, is a longtime friend of Trump’s, had paid for McDougal’s story but wasn’t printing it, a tabloid industry practice known as “catch and kill.”

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Court upholds surrogacy contracts as enforceable in Iowa

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — The birth mother of an 18-month-old girl, who agreed to be paid as a surrogate to have the baby, is not legally the child’s parent, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled Friday in an emotional case that concluded surrogacy contracts can be enforced in Iowa.

The ruling means the girl remains with the Cedar Rapids couple, the only parents she has known since leaving the hospital after birth.

It was the first time the state’s highest court has weighed whether surrogacy contracts can be enforced.

But the fight isn’t over. The birth mother plans to appeal port of the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“I no longer believe that surrogacy contracts should be entered into,” said the woman identified in court documents only as T.B., in a statement provided by her attorney. “Every child should have a mother and an essential part of the mother-child relationship is the role of pregnancy and the bonding that takes place during it. Children should not be sold.”