Federal judge cancels Adams’ corruption trial

NEW YORK>> A federal judge on Friday canceled the corruption trial for New York City Mayor Eric Adams and appointed counsel to advise him on how to handle the Justice Department’s controversial request to drop charges against the Democrat.

Judge Dale E. Ho’s written order means he won’t decide before mid-March whether to grant the dismissal of the case against the embattled mayor of the nation’s largest city.

At a hearing Wednesday, Acting Deputy U.S. Attorney General Emil Bove cited an executive order by President Donald Trump outlining his criminal justice priorities as he defended the request to drop charges.

Adams confirmed at the hearing that he accepted that charges could be reinstated later, a feature of the request to dismiss charges that has led critics to suggest that the mayor would be required to carry out Trump’s plans to round up New Yorkers who are in the country illegally if he wanted to remain free from prosecution.

Adams was indicted in September and accused of accepting more than $100,000 in illegal campaign contributions and travel perks from a Turkish official and business leaders seeking to buy influence while he was Brooklyn borough president.

Three shot and killed outside motor vehicle office, police say

LOUISVILLE, Ky.>> Three people were shot and killed outside a motor vehicle office Friday, police said.

Officers were called to the office around noon and found a man dead and two women wounded in the parking lot, according to a statement from police.

The two wounded were taken to a hospital, where they died.

Numerous police responded to the shooting at a state Driver Licensing Office on the southern outskirts of Louisville.

Police Maj. Donald Boeckman said the suspect or suspects left in a vehicle.

Boeckman did not have a description of the vehicle and said investigators were still reviewing surveillance video.

Boeckman also said police did not know if the victims were connected.

Rushdie’s attacker convicted of attempted murder

MAYVILLE, N.Y.>> A New Jersey man was convicted Friday of attempted murder for stabbing author Salman Rushdie multiple times on a New York lecture stage in 2022.

Jurors delivered the verdict after deliberating for less than two hours, also finding Hadi Matar, 27, guilty of assault for wounding a man who was on the Chautauqua Institution stage with Rushdie at the time.

Matar ran up to Rushdie as he was about to speak on Aug. 12, 2022, and stabbed him more than a dozen times before a live audience. The attack left the 77-year-old prize-winning novelist blind in one eye.

A separate federal indictment alleges that Matar was motivated to attack Rushdie by a 2006 speech in which the leader of the militant group Hezbollah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.

Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 after publication of the novel “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous.

Study: Dairy workers may have passed bird flu to pet cats

Two dairy workers in Michigan may have transmitted bird flu to their pet cats last May, suggests a new study published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In one household, infected cats may have passed the virus to other people in the home, but limited evidence makes it difficult to ascertain the possibility.

The results are from a study that was scheduled to be published in January but was delayed by the Trump administration’s pause on communications from the CDC.

A single data table from the new report briefly appeared online two weeks ago in a paper on the wildfires in California — then quickly disappeared. That odd incident prompted calls from public health experts for the study’s release.

The new paper still leaves major questions unanswered, including how the cats first became infected and whether farmworkers spread the virus to the cats and to other people in the household, experts said.

Officials in Michigan began investigating two households in May, when exclusively indoor cats showed respiratory and neurological symptoms and, after death, tested positive for the virus, called H5N1.

Killer chooses firing squad for execution

COLUMBIA, S.C.>> Condemned inmate Brad Sigmon has chosen to die next month by a firing squad, a method of execution that has not been used in the U.S. in 15 years.

Sigmon is scheduled to die March 7.

On Friday, he became the first South Carolina inmate to choose the state’s new firing squad over lethal injection or the electric chair.

Only three inmates in the U.S. have been executed by firing squad since 1976. All were in Utah, with the last one taking place in 2010.

Sigmon, 67, will be strapped to a chair and have a hood placed over his head and a target placed over his heart in the death chamber. Three volunteers will fire at him through a small opening about 15 feet away.

Lawyers for Sigmon asked to delay his execution date this month because they wanted to learn if the prisoner in South Carolina’s previous execution, Marion Bowman, was given two doses of pentobarbital at his execution and look over his autopsy report.

Pope’s condition isn’t life-threatening

ROME>> Pope Francis’ complex respiratory infection isn’t life-threatening, but he’s not out of danger, his medical team said Friday, as the 88-year-old pontiff marked his first week in the hospital battling pneumonia in both lungs — along with bacterial, viral and fungal infections on top of chronic bronchitis.

Francis’ doctors delivered their first in-person update on the pope’s condition, saying he will remain at Rome’s Gemelli hospital at least through next week. The pope is receiving occasional supplements of oxygen when he needs it and is responding to the drug therapy that was strengthened after the multiple infections were diagnosed, they said.

Gemelli hospital Dr. Sergio Alfieri and Francis’ personal physician, Dr. Luigi Carbone, said Francis remains in good spirits and humor.

— Denver Post wire services