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

Jerry Lewis, comedy icon and telethon host dies, at 91

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jerry Lewis, the manic, rubber-faced showman who jumped and hollered to fame in a lucrative partnership with Dean Martin, settled down to become a self-conscious screen auteur and found an even greater following as the tireless, teary host of the annual muscular dystrophy telethons, has died. He was 91.

Lewis died Sunday of natural causes in Las Vegas with his family by his side, publicist Candi Cazau said.

Tributes from friends, co-stars and disciples poured in immediately.

“That fool was no dummy. Jerry Lewis was an undeniable genius an unfathomable blessing, comedy’s absolute!” Jim Carrey wrote Sunday on Twitter. “I am because he was!”

“The world has lost a true innovator & icon,” comedian Dane Cook wrote.

___

Spanish town struggles to reconcile locals as extremist cell

RIPOLL, Spain (AP) — They were brothers and boyhood friends from a town with no unfamiliar faces. They were linked by Moroccan roots and equally tied by their upbringings in Ripoll, an ancient hub in the Catalan foothills known for its monastery and passageways dotted with cafes and kebab shops.

But most recently, police believe, the young men were drawn together by an imam and an alleged plot to murder on a massive scale — an extraordinary secret for 12 people to keep for months on end.

In the suspected extremist cell’s final days, the group accumulated more than 100 gas canisters, blew up a house in a botched effort to make bombs, drove a van through Barcelona’s storied Las Ramblas promenade, and attacked beachside tourists, Spanish authorities said.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attacks that killed at least 14 people and left scores wounded. Five of the dozen were shot dead by police.

Now, Ripoll is cut off by police roadblocks as the search for an alleged cell member thought to still be on the run continues. Families and friends in the town are torn between horror at the bloodshed and grief for the children they thought they knew.

___

10 Things to Know for Monday

Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about Monday:

1. COMEDY ICON JERRY LEWIS DIES AT AGE 91

The manic, rubber-faced showman who jumped and hollered to fame in a lucrative partnership with Dean Martin, settled down to become a self-conscious screen auteur and found an even greater following as host of the annual muscular dystrophy telethons.

2. WHICH SPANISH TOWN IS STRUGGLING TO RECONCILE LOCALS AS EXTREMIST CELL

Ripoll is cut off by police roadblocks as the search for an alleged cell member thought to still be on the run continues after attacks that killed at least 14 people.

___

US warship collides with tanker near Singapore; 10 missing

SINGAPORE (AP) — A U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer collided with a tanker early Monday in waters east of Singapore and the Strait of Malacca, and at least 10 sailors are missing.

The Navy said five others were hurt.

The USS John S. McCain sustained damage on its port side aft, or left rear, from the collision with the Alnic MC that happened at 5:24 a.m., the Navy’s 7th Fleet said. It wasn’t immediately clear if the oil and chemical tanker sustained damage or casualties in the collision.

The Navy said Osprey aircraft and Seahawk helicopters from the USS America were assisting. It also said tugboats and Singaporean naval and coast guard vessels were in the area to render assistance.

Malaysia’s navy chief Ahmad Kamarulzaman Ahmad Badaruddin tweeted that two ships as well as aircraft from its navy and air force have been deployed to help look for the missing U.S. sailors.

___

Eclipse eve: Millions converge across US to see sun go dark

Millions of Americans converged on a narrow corridor stretching from Oregon to South Carolina to watch the moon blot out the midday sun Monday for a wondrous couple of minutes in the first total solar eclipse to sweep coast to coast in 99 years.

Veteran eclipse watchers warned the uninitiated to get ready to be blown away.

Planetariums and museums posted “Sold out of eclipse glasses” on their front doors. Signs along highways reminded motorists of “Solar Eclipse Monday,” while cars bore the message “Eclipse or bust.”

With 200 million people within a day’s drive of the path of totality, towns and parks braced for monumental crowds. It’s expected to be the most observed, most studied and most photographed eclipse ever. Not to mention the most festive, what with all the parties.

In Salem, Oregon, a field outside the state fairgrounds was transformed into a campground in advance of an eclipse-watching party for 8,500.

___

Trump will address path forward on Afghanistan

CAMP MOREHEAD, Afghanistan (AP) — Signalling that the U.S. military expects its mission to continue, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan on Sunday hailed the launch of the Afghan Army’s new special operations corps, declaring that “we are with you and we will stay with you.”

Gen. John Nicholson’s exhortation of continued support for the Afghans suggested the Pentagon may have won its argument that America’s military must stay engaged in the conflict in order to insure terrorists don’t once again threaten the U.S. from safe havens in Afghanistan.

The White House announced that President Donald Trump would address the nation’s troops and the American people Monday night to update the path forward in Afghanistan and South Asia.

Nicholson, speaking prior to the White House announcement, said the commandos and a plan to double the size of the Afghan’s special operations forces are critical to winning the war.

“I assure you we are with you in this fight. We are with you and we will stay with you,” he said during a ceremony at Camp Morehead, a training base for Afghan commandos southeast of Kabul.

___

Prosecutors: Prof killed boyfriend as part of sexual fantasy

CHICAGO (AP) — The fatal stabbing of a hairstylist in Chicago was part of a sexual fantasy hatched in an online chatroom between a Northwestern University professor and an Oxford University employee, whose plan included killing someone and then themselves, prosecutors told a Cook County judge Sunday at a bond hearing for the men.

An Illinois prosecutor shared disturbing new details about the July 27 slaying, describing to the court how Trenton James Cornell-Duranleau, the 26-year-old boyfriend of since-fired microbiology professor Wyndham Lathem, was stabbed 70 times at Lathem’s Chicago condo and with such brutality that he was nearly decapitated. His throat was slit and pulmonary artery torn.

Lathem, 46, had communicated for months before with Andrew Warren, 56, about “carrying out their sexual fantasies of killing others and then themselves,” Natosha Toller, an assistant Cook County state’s Attorney, told the court. While the prosecutor used the plural in talking about the alleged fantasy to kill, she did not say there were other victims.

Judge Adam Bourgeois Jr. at one point shook his head in apparent disgust as he listened to the prosecutor offer a chilling narrative of the slaying. He later deemed both men potentially dangerous and flight risks, ordering them to remain in jail pending trial on first-degree murder charges.

“The heinous facts speak for themselves,” he said.

___

1979 Klan-Nazi attack survivor hopes for a ‘justice river’

GREENSBORO, N.C. (AP) — The Rev. Nelson Johnson needs no reminders of the massacre of five of his labour-activist friends almost 40 years ago — he still has the faded scar on his left arm, left by a Nazi who stabbed him as white supremacists descended on a march for workers through black neighbourhoods in Greensboro.

But the violence surrounding the Aug. 12 march by Ku Klux Klansmen and Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the death of a young woman hit by a car there, brought the events of Nov. 3, 1979, in sharper focus for him.

“I was horrified,” he said.

Johnson, now 74, was a member of the Workers Viewpoint Organization, which planned a march through a public housing project in Greensboro before a labour conference on Nov. 3, 1979. While the focus was on workers, textile mill wages and brown lung disease, it was also billed as a “Death to the Klan” rally. Both the rally title and the organization’s decision to rename itself the Communist Workers Party were mistakes, Johnson now acknowledges.

Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen drove into the march and then fired at demonstrators, and a report found that some demonstrators also were armed and fired in response. Five marchers were killed and at least 10 people were wounded, including Johnson. All-white juries at two trials acquitted the Klan and Nazi members, who claimed self-defence. Testimony showed both the police and the then-Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had been warned by informants about the Klan-Nazi plans.

___

Fallen forensics: Judges routinely allow disavowed science

BOSTON (AP) — Two hairs that looked like the victim’s; some dirt on a truck like that taken from the crime scene; a pattern on the bumper that resembled a design on the victim’s popular brand of jeans. The case against Steven Barnes in the rape and murder of a 16-year-old girl seemed circumstantial, at best.

So the guilty verdict shocked him.

“I was saying, ‘This can’t be happening. You can’t convict somebody on similarities, perhaps or maybes,'” Barnes said.

He spent the next 20 years in prison before DNA testing exonerated him, becoming one of hundreds of people convicted in whole or in part on forensic science that has come under fire during the past decade.

Some of that science — analysis of bite marks, latent fingerprints, firearms identification, burn patterns in arson investigations, footwear patterns and tire treads — was once considered sound, but is now being denounced by some lawyers and scientists who say it has not been studied enough to prove its reliability and in some cases has led to wrongful convictions.

___

Sex offenders can live next door to victims in many states

EDMOND, Okla. (AP) — A convicted sex offender who molested his niece when she was 7 years old moved in next door to his victim nearly a dozen years after he was sent to prison for the crime.

Outraged, the Oklahoma woman, now 21, called lawmakers, the police and advocacy groups to plead with them to take action. Danyelle Dyer soon discovered that what Harold Dwayne English did in June is perfectly legal in the state — as well as in 44 others that don’t specifically bar sex offenders from living near their victims, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“I always felt safe in my home, but it made me feel like I couldn’t go home, I couldn’t have my safe space anymore,” Dyer told The Associated Press, which typically doesn’t identify victims of sexual assault, but is doing so in Dyer’s case because she agreed to allow her name to be used in hopes of drawing attention to the issue. “He would mow in between our houses. Him moving in brought back a lot of those feelings.”

Advocacy groups say the Oklahoma case appears to be among the first in the U.S. where a sex offender has exploited the loophole, which helps explain why dozens of other states have unknowingly allowed it to exist.

“This is something that I would dare say was never envisioned would happen,” said Richard Barajas, a retired Texas judge and executive director of the non-profit National Organization for Victim Assistance. “In all the years that I’ve been involved with the criminal justice system, I’ve never seen a case like this.”