An apology to Courtney Smith is a step in the right direction for Urban Meyer and Ohio State, even if we ignore the fact that it took Meyer 48 hours to craft a statement he could have easily issued when directly asked for comment – like during Ohio State’s news conference Wednesday night. Meyer dodged the question in favor of a bland, meaningless response.

Meyer was asked Wednesday, during a news conference announcing his three-game suspension, whether he had any comment for Smith, the ex-wife of former Ohio State assistant coach Zach Smith. His answer could be described as tepid at best, and at worst callous and utterly unsympathetic.

“I have a message for everyone in this: I’m sorry we are in this situation,” Meyer replied, in the same tone that defined his emotionless opening statement.

He struck a more contrite tone in a statement posted Friday to his Twitter account, with a direct apology to Smith “and her children for what they have gone through.”

“My words and demeanor on Wednesday did not show how seriously I take relationship violence. I sincerely apologize,” read Meyer’s statement.

Ohio State’s football program has “worked hard to educate and remind our coaches and players of the seriousness of relationship violence,” he continued. “I understand my lack of more action in this situation has raised concerns about this commitment.”

It may be that a coach with noted memory issues – as detailed in the findings of a two-week independent investigation – finally, after deep deliberation, recollected that his statement on Wednesday only served to underline the idea that he failed to grasp the gravity of the situation.

It’s more likely the impetus behind Friday’s apology is that Meyer realized he had bungled yet another situation. Add it to the list, and the list keeps growing: Hiring Zach Smith in 2012, keeping Zach Smith on staff in 2015, lying at last month’s Big Ten media days and deleting text messages more than a year old from his phone, to name a few.

MORE: Ohio State suspends football coach Urban Meyer three games

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Yet there is a positive: Meyer apologized. His response on Wednesday implied that he didn’t view Courtney Smith’s allegations as credible, that he was attempting to steer clear of any culpability or, worse yet, that he didn’t feel he needed to apologize – that he’d done nothing wrong, a mentality that would be as frightening as it would be disgusting.

If long overdue, the apology now implies that Meyer is willing to accept his responsibility. And in doing so, Meyer added, he intends “to use my voice more effectively to be a part of the solution.”

We’ll see if that’s true. But Meyer becoming a voice for awareness on the topic of domestic abuse – or “relationship violence,” as he put it – would be a worthy takeaway for the Buckeyes’ embattled head coach, who may return to the sidelines in September but will always be dogged by his part in the scandal.

Then again, Meyer’s apology marinated for two days before being dumped online in the early evening on a Friday. It doesn’t take a cynic to question whether Meyer is motivated by remorse or self-preservation.

 

A mother faced a visit from police and an Illinois Department of Children and Family Services investigation after she allowed her 8-year-old daughter to walk the family’s dog around the block alone on Aug. 2.

Corey Widen was cleared in that investigation, “Good Morning America” reported Friday, and she is now speaking out about her experience.

The incident happened as Widen’s daughter walked the family dog, Marshmallow, around the block. A stranger saw the girl walking the dog alone and called police, the Chicago Tribune reports. 

Widen told the publication that she can see most of the block from her home’s windows. Walking the Maltese dog is the only time her daughter is unsupervised, she said.

The family lives in a safe area in the Chicago suburbs, she told “Good Morning America.”

But a concerned neighbor contacted police, believing the girl was under the age of 5, the show reported.

Like many states, Illinois law is not clear on the subject of child supervision, the Tribune reports. The law says a child less than the age of 14 is neglected if he or she is left “without supervision for an unreasonable period of time without regard for the mental or physical health, safety or welfare of that minor.”

August 24: Michigan mom said 911 refused to send help for infant locked in hot car; police apologize

August 23: Police officer who breastfed a crying baby rewarded with a promotion in Argentina

Widen told USA TODAY on Friday that as her story has gained national attention, she’s received an outpouring of positive messages. She said through the process she’s learned that other mothers have gone through similar situations with little support.

Some states, such as Utah, have passed laws that clearly allow children to do certain activities alone – such as walking to school or playing outside, Quartz reports. In part, those laws are thanks to a “free range” parenting movement that values children’s independence.

For critics who say her daughter is too young to be outside unsupervised, Widen responded: “I would say every 8-year-old is different … every neighborhood is different, every parent is different. So you can’t make an overall judgment like that,” Widen told “Good Morning America.”

 

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Arsenal manager Unai Emery has told Aaron Ramsey to focus on his football amid ongoing contract talks with the club.

Ramsey’s deal ends next summer but Emery has challenged the midfielder to show his “capacity to help the team”.

“I only need his focus on training, the matches and on his performance each day,” said Emery.

The Welshman, 27, was left out of the starting XI against Chelsea, but could return to face West Ham on Saturday.

Asked whether he felt Ramsey lacked focus, Emery replied: “I don’t know, but I am thinking in the present.

“I spoke with him last week but now, today, my focus is on the match and I want the player to be focused only on Saturday.”

The Gunners have seen on-pitch matters overshadowed by drawn-out contract negotiations before, with the futures of Mesut Ozil, Alexis Sanchez and Jack Wilshere having proved a headache to former manager Arsene Wenger.

Sanchez and Wilshere have since moved elsewhere, while 29-year-old German midfielder Mesut Ozil – who announced his retirement from international football after this summer’s World Cup – became the highest-paid player in the club’s history when he signed fresh terms in January.

BBC Sport understands the north London club have offered Wales international Ramsey a new contract, but reports suggest he is seeking a significant increase in wages on his current deal.

Ramsey joined the Gunners in 2008 in a £4.8m move from hometown club Cardiff City, and the midfielder has scored 36 goals in 234 Premier League appearances.

Former Arsenal defender and BBC pundit Martin Keown has said Arsenal should be “desperate” to keep hold of Ramsey, who has won three FA Cups with the club, scoring two match-winning goals at Wembley.

Cucuta, Colombia – Two months ago, 23-year-old Gregoris Suarez made a pact with three friends on his city block.

They promised each other they would join the massive exodus of people from their native Venezuela and make their way to Peru.

By mid-August, they had made contacts with Venezuelans in Peru who could help them get housing and jobs, sold off a few possessions and raised money from family members to make their trip. 

But with announcement by Ecuadorian and Peruvian officials last week that their countries would begin denying entry to those crossing their borders without passports, the plans of many Venezuelans hoping to flee were suddenly put up in the air. 

For Suarez and his friends, however, they never considered giving up. 

“What choice to we have but to migrate?” he said, standing with his friends beside piled luggage at the bustling Venezuelan border on Friday.

Suarez, a former construction worker from Valencia, is an example of the thousands of Venezuelans who prefer to try their luck at freshly tightened borders over weathering the poverty and hunger of their own crumbling country.

“If they don’t let us through, we’ll find a way to get through,” Suarez told Al Jazeera.

According to the UN, there were more than 2.3 million Venezuelans living abroad as of June. Nearly half a million entered Peru from 2017 through June of this year, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported. 

The mass exodus has been driven, in part, due to hyperinflation. The country continues to suffer from food and medicine shortages and a political crisis that has left much of the country polarised. 

‘We’re going in search of a better life’

At the Simon Bolivar International Bridge connecting Colombia and Venezuela, tens of thousands of people cross every day. Most dip into Colombia to buy food or medicine then return home. The rest line the roadway, seated in the shade atop the heaps of luggage they packed to start a new life abroad.

Many Venezuelans who cross the border do so with no documents or only a paper id. Most can’t afford the more than $1,000 in bribes or several months of waiting required to get a passport as Venezuela’s bureaucracy crumbles.

“The price of the passport has gone up because it’s all controlled by mafias,” said Iren Garcia, a 37-year-old refinery worker from Lara state.

“The majority of Venezuelans want to leave but don’t have resources,” he told Al Jazeera.

But for others, the desperation has driven them to make the journey without a passport in hopes of making it to their final destination.

Carlos Brisuela , 41, sat with his friend on a Colombian street curb near the Venezuelan border, holding their luggage and pondering their next move. They are aiming to make it to Ecuador, where they hope friends will help get them a job.

Neither could feed their families, even though they full-time jobs in Puerto la Cruz in eastern Venezuela, so the two men sold Brisuela’s car and made the two-day travel to Colombia, sleeping in bus terminals along the way.

“We don’t have money. We don’t have anywhere to go. We came in the hands of God,” Brisuela told Al Jazeera. “We’re going in search of a better life.”

Tightened rules ‘incentivise undocumented migration’

On Friday, Ecuador reportedly opened a humanitarian corridor to allow the hundreds of Venezuelans who had arrived at its borders to pass to Peru. 

The reports surfaced as Ecuador’s public defender’s office, which had challenged the new passport rules, announced on Twitter that a judge had ruled against the restrictions because they “had no effect”.  The news came just hours before Peru was set to tighten its borders. 

Prior to that announcement, Colombian authorities said they feared the recent decisions by Ecuador and Peru to shut their borders to those without passports would only drive more migrants and refugees into the shadows.

“Asking for passports from a nation that doesn’t have them, and whose government doesn’t facilitation the issuance of such document, incentivises irregularity,” said Christian Kruger, head of Colombia’s migration authority, in a statement Thursday.

Since the announcement of the new passport rules last week, Colombia’s migration authority said it has recorded a decrease in traffic over official border crossings and an increase in use of irregular crossings. Detailed figures were not yet available.

Colombia on Monday will host immigration authorities from Ecuador and Peru with hopes of developing a collaborative approach.

“We should find common practices that allow for a documented, ordered and safe migration,” Kruger said.

Migration authorities in Ecuador and Peru did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.

On Thursday, the UN and the International Organization for Migration urged Latin American countries to ease access for Venezuelans fleeing their country’s economic and political crisis.

“We recognise the growing challenges associated with the large scale arrival of Venezuelans,” UN refugee agency chief Filippo Grandi said in a statement.

Back at the border, Rafael Mantilla, a 35-year-old sushi chef from Caracas, waited with him son.

Mantilla, who, unlike most, had resources to flee to Colombia earlier this year, worked six months in Bogota to raise money to help pay for his family’s move.

Last week, he returned to Caracas to pick up his 12-year-old son, Daniel, and take him to Quito, Ecuador, where a contact has promised him work in a sushi kitchen.

Neither Mantilla nor his son has a passport. On Saturday night they’ll take a bus to the Ecuadorian border.

“I can’t pass up this opportunity,” he said. “I don’t believe they will stop me.”

The scoop Friday was that the National Enquirer supported President Donald Trump as a candidate in 2016, but his rivals already knew the paper’s front page shouted critical stories about them throughout the campaign.

Ben Carson was portrayed in a “bombshell investigation” of the Republican primaries in October 2015 as a “bungling surgeon,” based on a review of malpractice lawsuits against him. Carson has since joined Trump’s cabinet as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called the paper “garbage” filled with “complete and utter lies” after a “tabloid smear” in March 2016 that he had five mistresses.

And Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton repeatedly made the front page of the supermarket tabloid before, during and after the campaign. The paper reported she had “six months to live!” in September 2015 and then that she was “corrupt! racist! criminal!” in November 2016. She remains alive and not in jail.

Jennifer Palmieri, former communications director for Clinton’s campaign, said the National Enquirer was viewed as “another arm of the Trump campaign during 2016.”

“Just take a look at the magazine’s covers. They were a toxic brew of every crazy Hillary conspiracy theory out there combined with pro-Trump propaganda,” Palmieri told USA TODAY.

A safe of damaging stories?

The latest revelation Thursday was that David Pecker, CEO of American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer, was granted immunity by federal prosecutors for dealing with hush money paid to women associated with Trump before the election, according to The Wall Street Journal and Vanity Fair magazine.

Pecker was long an ally of Trump, but has been accused of helping mute negative stories about him. The paper kept a safe containing documents about hush-money payments and damaging stories it killed as part of its cozy relationship with Donald Trump leading up to 2016 presidential election, people familiar with the arrangement told The Associated Press on Friday.

AMI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from USA TODAY.

Going after Trump enemies 

But rivals to Trump accused the paper of supporting him long before the financial allegations came to light.

In April 2016, the National Enquirer published a photograph purporting to be of Cruz’s father Rafael next to Lee Harvey Oswald three months before the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, implying a potential connection to the shooting.

Cruz called the JFK accusation “just kooky” and said that it was not even his father depicted in the photograph. 

He also strongly denied having mistresses.

“Let me be clear, this National Enquirer story is garbage,” Cruz told reporters in March 2016 in Wisconsin. “It is a tabloid smear, and it is a smear that has come from Donald Trump and his henchmen.”

Trump replied that he had nothing to do with the mistress story.

“Ted Cruz’s problem with the National Enquirer is his and his alone, and while they were right about O.J. Simpson, John Edwards, and many others, I certainly hope they are not right about Lyin’ Ted Cruz,” Trump said.

But Trump questioned the Oswald picture on Fox News in May 2016.

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being you know shot,” Trump said. “Nobody’s even bringing this up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported and nobody talks about it.”

Chris Wilson, CEO of WPA Intelligence who worked on the Cruz campaign, said the estimated $5 billion in free media that Trump received helped propel his populist candidacy, but the National Enquirer provides a “minuscule fraction.” Wilson said Trump would have won the primary with or without the paper.

“There’s no doubt that David Pecker, as a long-term friend of Donald Trump’s, was covering 2016 in a way that was going to help his friend,” Wilson said. “But there is no evidence the outlandish stories about Rafael having assassinated JFK or Ted Cruz being some kind of secret lothario had much impact on the campaign.”

Then there was Hillary Clinton

The National Enquirer’s health complaints about Clinton ran the gamut from vision loss to cancer and blood clots. Then Trump would cite her lack of stamina as a reason for voters to reject her.

For her part, Clinton appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in August 2016 to demonstrate she was healthy, in part by opening a jar of pickles.

“On the one hand, it’s part of the wacky strategy. Just say all these crazy things and maybe you can get some people to believe you,” Clinton said. “On the other hand, it just absolutely makes no sense. I don’t go around questioning Donald Trump’s health.”

Palmieri said there was a time when a National Enquirer story could have hurt a candidate because they had enormous resources and would pay sources.

“But honestly I did not worry about them in ‘16 because they had exposed themselves as being so pro-Trump, they lost whatever credibility they may have had to hurt us,” Palmieri said.

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WASHINGTON – As President Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen stood in a courtroom this week and pleaded guilty to paying hush money to a porn star he was handing good government advocates something they haven’t had in a while: A win.

Despite a campaign finance system that members of both parties acknowledge is broken and a series of fumbled high-profile public corruption trials, the Cohen plea became the rare case to focus the public’s attention on the vagaries of campaign law.   

The Cohen case has brought the staid world of campaign finance regulations to the fore in large part because it involves the president, but also because of the scintillating details. Cohen, who once professed his loyalty by saying he would take a bullet for his boss, admitted Tuesday to paying off two women to quiet their allegations of relationships with Trump.

Prosecutors said Cohen worked with  American Media Inc., publisher of supermarket tabloids, to pay the women for their stories, a “capture and kill” scheme to ensure the claims were never printed. The Associated Press reported Thursday that National Enquirer, which is owned by AMI, kept a safe of documents outlining payments it used to kill stories damaging to Trump.

“Before, you would talk to people about campaign-finance issues and their eyes would glaze over,” said Ann Ravel, a former Federal Election Commission chairwoman who left the commission last year in frustration.

“But now the public is getting a flavor of why it’s so important,” she said. “It might have to be associated with a sex star to make the public understand.”

Enforcement lacking

It’s been a vexing decade for campaign finance reform advocates. Partisan gridlock at the Federal Election Commission has meant the six-member board charged with enforcing campaign finance regulations has deadlocked in roughly a third of its cases – up significantly from a decade ago.

More than a year after Ravel’s departure, her seat remains open and the commission is working with a bare-minimum quorum of four members. All are serving expired terms. Members are appointed by the president and Congress and must be confirmed by the Senate.

Congress has been unwilling to touch the broader issue of campaign finance in a substantive way since it approved the bipartisan McCain-Feingold Act in 2002.

“We haven’t had effective enforcement at the Federal Election Commission in 10 years,” said Paul Ryan, a top attorney with the Washington-based Common Cause.

The Justice Department, meanwhile, has had a spotty record closing high-profile public corruption cases. The Supreme Court overturned the felony conviction of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, two years ago. Prosecutors’ years long pursuit of Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., ended in a mistrial last year.

In the most on-point historic example, the Justice Department failed to convict former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards, a Democrat, for a $1 million scheme to hide his pregnant mistress during the 2008 campaign.

Edwards relied on a defense that some of Trump’s allies have embraced: That he paid the money to shield his family, not his political ambitions.

Lessons learned

In Cohen’s case, prosecutors said they were armed with reams of documents, text messages and phone records they said proved Trump directed the payments in the weeks before the election. They also said he coordinated the payment with “one or more members of the campaign.”

More: President Trump attacks ex-lawyer: ‘I would strongly suggest that you don’t retain services of Michael Cohen’

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And three key witnesses – the Trump Organization’s longtime chief financial officer and two executives with the parent company of the National Enquirer – are said to have been granted immunity to cooperate with prosecutors in the Cohen case. The National Enquirer’s parent firm paid $150,000 to buy and bury the story of Karen McDougal, one of the women who said she slept with Trump.

Jeff Tsai, a defense attorney and former federal prosecutor, said it was rare for the government to have a case in which it alleges an illegal contribution that was coordinated with the campaign.

Another takeaway from the Edwards case, Tsai said, is that the government should only pursue the violations when prosecutors are certain they can prove them.

“The chief lesson is to be narrowly tailored,” Tsai said.

The circumstances of the Cohen payments were also different: Trump accusers Stormy Daniels and McDougal were threatening to take their story public, while Edwards’ mistress, Rielle Hunter, was not.

Longtime Republican campaign finance attorney Jan W. Baran said the decision to pursue Cohen could be an indication that prosecutors are feeling more comfortable with cases involving in-kind contributions that involve both personal and political benefit.

Baran, a former general counsel for the Republican National Committee, said he believes the law is far from settled.

“These two campaign finance counts signal that the Justice Department wants to test drive again a theory that personal payments violate the campaign law,” Baran said.

Campaign confusion

Most campaign violations fly under the radar, despite polls showing voters oppose the way money influences elections. Campaign law is complicated. In fact, it’s so arcane that Trump himself this week made the argument that the campaign-finance felonies Cohen pleaded guilty to aren’t criminal acts.

In a Fox News interview that aired Thursday, Trump said he learned from watching “lawyers on television” that the things Cohen admitted to aren’t “even crimes.”

He insisted that no laws were violated because no campaign funds were used to pay Daniels and he later reimbursed Cohen for the payoff.

“They didn’t come out of the campaign,” the president said of the funds. “They came from me.”

Legal experts challenged Trump’s interpretation, noting that Cohen admitted providing the $130,000 to Daniels ahead of the election to influence the results. That far exceeded the $2,700 limit on what can individual could donate to help Trump win the general election.

But Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine said it’s the kind of argument that might sway voters given the complexity of campaign finance law.

“I would say campaign finance violations are seen as technical and difficult for the public to understand,” he said. “People don’t have a frame of reference.”

The Cohen plea may change that, at least for a little while, Ravel said.

She said the Department of Justice’s aggressive prosecution in the case gives her hope.

“For a long time, those of us at the FEC who were frustrated with the deadlock hoped that DOJ would step into the breach,” she said, “and this is a sign of that happening.”

Contributing: Brad Heath

 

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