By MARGERY A. BECK, Associated Press

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — No formal agreement has been signed to convert a remote state prison in Nebraska into the latest immigration detention center for President Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown, more than three weeks since the governor announced the plan and as lawmakers and nearby residents grow increasingly skeptical.

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Corrections officials insist the facility could start housing hundreds of male detainees next month, with classrooms and other spaces at the McCook Work Ethic Camp retrofitted for beds. However, lawmakers briefed last week by state officials said they got few concrete answers about cost, staffing and oversight.

“There was more unanswered questions than answered questions in terms of what they know,” state Sen. Wendy DeBoer said.

Officials in the city of McCook were caught off guard in mid-August when Republican Gov. Jim Pillen announced that the minimum-security prison in rural southwest Nebraska would serve as a Midwest hub for immigration detainees. Pillen and federal officials dubbed it the “Cornhusker Clink,” in line with other alliterative detention centers such as “ Alligator Alcatraz ” in Florida and the “ Speedway Slammer ” in Indiana.

“City leaders were given absolutely no choice in the matter,” said Mike O’Dell, publisher of the local newspaper, the McCook Gazette.

McCook is the seat of Red Willow County where voters favored Trump in the 2024 election by nearly 80%. Most of them likely support the president’s immigration crackdown, O’Dell said. However, the city of around 7,000 has also grown accustomed to the camp’s low-level offenders working on roads, in parks, county and city offices and even local schools.

“People here have gotten to know them in many cases,” O’Dell said. “I think there is a feeling here that people want to know where these folks are going to end up and that they’ll be OK.”

The Work Ethic Camp first opened in 2001 and currently houses around 155 inmates who participate in education, treatment and work programs to help them transition to life outside prison. State leaders often praise it as success story for reducing prisoner recidivism.

FILE – Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, speaks during a news conference at the Department of Agriculture to rollout the USDA’S National Farm Security Action Plan in Washington, July 8, 2025. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

Some lawmakers have complained that Pillen acted rashly in offering up the facility, noting that the state’s prison system is already one of the nation’s most overcrowded and perpetually understaffed. The governor’s office and state prison officials met with members of the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee last week to answer questions about the transfer.

What the lawmakers got, several said, were estimates and speculation.

Lawmakers were told it was the governor’s office that approached federal officials with the offer after Trump “made a generalized, widespread call that we need more room or something for detainees,” said DeBoer, a Democrat in the officially nonpartisan Legislature.

Lawmakers were also told the facility — which was designed to house around 100 but is currently outfitted to hold twice that — would house between 200 and 300 detainees. The prison’s current staff of 97 is to be retrained and stay on.

The costs of the transition would be borne by the state, with the expectation that the federal government would reimburse that cost, DeBoer recalled.

A formal agreement between the state and federal agency had yet to be signed by Friday.

Asked how much the state is anticipated to spend on the conversion, the agency said “that number has not yet been determined,” but that any state expenditures would be reimbursed. The state plans to hire additional staffers for the center, the agency said.

A letter signed by 13 lawmakers called into question whether Pillen had the authority to unilaterally transfer use of a state prison to federal authorities without legislative approval.

To that end, state Sen. Terrell McKinney — chairman of the Legislature’s Urban Affairs Committee and a vocal critic of Nebraska’s overcrowded prison system — convened a public hearing Friday to seek answers from Pillen’s office and state corrections officials, citing concerns over building code violations that fall under the committee’s purview.

“How can you take a facility that was built for 125 people and take that to a capacity of 200 to 300 people without creating, you know, a security risk?” McKinney asked.

Pillen maintains state law gives him the authority to make the move, saying the Department of Correctional Services falls under the umbrella of the executive branch. He and state prison officials declined to show up at Friday’s hearing.

But dozens of Nebraska residents did attend, with most of them opposed to the new ICE detention center.

By LORNE COOK

BRUSSELS (AP) — Since Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO has focused on trying to deter an attack on its own territory and avoid all-out war with nuclear armed Russia. Now the time has come for NATO to defend itself, and European allies might have to do it alone, experts and leaders say.

As it has attacked Ukraine, Russia has incessantly harassed Kyiv’s European backers. Warplanes and ships have breached NATO airspace and waters. Transport and communications networks have been sabotaged in attacks blamed on Russia. Disinformation campaigns have sought to undermine support and weaken unity. Putin opponents have been poisoned in Europe in the past too.

But the flight of multiple Russian drones over Poland this week marks a clear escalation, experts say. NATO responded with overwhelming force. Cheap drones were shot down with high-tech military kit and top-line F-35 jets were deployed. A costly exercise.

Russia’s armed forces said they weren’t targeting Poland. Belarus suggested the drones veered off course, perhaps due to jamming.

Territorial defense officers clean up debris from the destroyed roof of a house, after multiple Russian drones struck, in Wyryki near Lublin, Poland, Thursday, Sept. 11, 2025. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

France, the Netherlands and the U.K. are sending more equipment to help Poland defend its borders, notably near Belarus where Russia launched military exercises on Friday. NATO’s eastern flank in Europe will be bolstered with more air defenses stationed there.

Europe is alone, for now

It’s “unclear what more – if anything – the U.S. is willing to do to strengthen NATO air defenses. So far, we’ve seen Europeans operating U.S. platforms without a direct American military role,” NATO’s longest-serving spokesperson Oana Lungescu, now an expert at the RUSI think tank, said on social media.

NATO relies on U.S. leadership, but the Trump administration insists that Europe must now take care of its own security, and that of Ukraine.

Europe’s leaders have condemned the drone incident and promised action. President Donald Trump has said that it “could have been a mistake.”

President Donald Trump holds a photo of himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin during an announcement in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, Aug. 22, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

Trump’s ambiguity about defending Europe has undermined trust at NATO, despite the alliance’s attempts to project unity at a summit in July.

“We would also wish that the drone attack on Poland was a mistake. But it wasn’t. And we know it,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk posted on X on Friday.

After a meeting of the Polish National Security Council on Thursday, Tusk said: “We would all prefer that the biggest ally spoke openly and publicly about this incident, but let’s not be picky, we must also get accustomed to the new situation.”

Russia takes advantage

For Putin, it’s as good a time as any to test NATO’s resolve. To the dismay of Ukraine and European allies, Trump dropped his demands for an immediate ceasefire at his summit with Russia’s leader in Alaska last month, preferring a broader deal to end the war.

Long-threatened U.S. sanctions against Russia have remained just threats and Putin has bought more time to try to seize Ukrainian territory. Winter is approaching and the fighting is likely to grind to a halt within a few months anyway.

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“Putin is really out now to put down a marker to NATO,” Jamie Shea, an expert on international security at the Chatham House think tank in London and a former top NATO official, told The Associated Press.

By provoking the allies to send air defenses to Poland, some of which might otherwise be bound for Ukraine, Putin wants to force the allies to “make the choice between defending NATO and defend Ukraine, which should be the same thing,” Shea said.

Should they be unable to do so, he said, “from Putin’s point of view, this would be a very happy development because then he would be able to take apart Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, cause misery for the Ukrainian population.”

How best to respond

It would not be easy for European allies to defend everyone at once without integrating their air defense systems with Ukraine. One possibility might be for Poland to accept Kyiv’s request to shoot down Russian missiles over western Ukraine should their trajectory take them toward Polish territory. Tusk’s government has never ruled out doing so.

Either way, time is on Russia’s side. While Trump has agreed to sell American weapons to the Europeans to help them arm themselves and Ukraine, many must be manufactured first. Putin understands that these systems take months, if not years, to make.

The drone incident came just before Russia’s joint military exercise with Belarus — dubbed “Zapad 2025,” or “West 2025,” — got underway and could be linked. NATO accused Russia of using the “Zapad” exercises in 2021 to pre-position equipment for its invasion of Ukraine the following year.

FILE – Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko shake hands during a meeting in St. Petersburg, Russia, Jan. 29, 2024. (Dmitry Astakhov, Sputnik, Government Pool Photo via AP, File)

That the exercises are taking place, even with a smaller Russian presence than usual, is “to demonstrate that (Putin) can invade Ukraine and put pressure on NATO at the same time,” Shea said.

Few experts think NATO will resort to activating Article 5 of its founding treaty over the incident — the three musketeers-like pledge that an attack on one ally will be treated as an attack on them all — and the military alliance has not suggested that it would.

For now, bolstering defenses on NATO’s eastern flank is the order of the day.

Associated Press writers Danica Kirka in London, Jamey Keaten in Geneva and Claudia Ciobanu in Warsaw, Poland, contributed to this report.

By JULIA FRANKEL

JERUSALEM (AP) — An employee stabbed two guests at a hotel outside of Jerusalem on Friday, the second attack by a Palestinian in the area this week.

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According to police, the employee came out of the kitchen at a hotel in the bucolic Kibbutz Tzuba and stabbed two guests in the dining room.

An off-duty police officer and the hotel’s dining manager tackled the attacker until more officers arrived and arrested him.

Israeli paramedics said they evacuated two men, aged approximately 50 and 25, to a nearby hospital. They said both had been stabbed in their torsos, the older man left in critical condition.

Israeli police, who described the stabbing as a militant attack, said the suspect was from the Shuafat area in east Jerusalem, and that three other suspects were also arrested on suspicion they were involved in the attack. Hamas praised the attack but did not claim responsibility for it.

Two Palestinians from the occupied West Bank opened fire at a bus stop at Jerusalem earlier this week, killing six people. Hamas claimed that attack.

The war in the Gaza Strip, triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack into Israel, has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and sparked a surge of violence in Israel and the occupied West Bank.

By DAVID A. LIEB and M.K. WILDEMAN, Associated Press

President Donald Trump has approved federal disaster aid for six states and tribes following storms and floods that occurred this spring and summer.

The disaster declarations, announced Thursday, will allow federal funding to flow to Kansas, North Carolina, North Dakota and Wisconsin, and for tribes in Montana and South Dakota. In each case except Wisconsin, it took Trump more than a month to approve the aid requests from local officials, continuing a trend of longer waits for disaster relief noted by a recent Associated Press analysis.

Trump has now approved more than 30 major natural disaster declarations since taking office in January. Before the latest batch, his approvals had averaged a 34-day wait from the time the relief was requested. For his most recent declarations, that wait ranged from just 15 days following an aid request for Wisconsin flooding in August to 56 days following a tribal request for Montana flooding that occurred in May.

The AP’s analysis showed that delays in approving federal disaster aid have grown over time, regardless of the party in power. On average, it took less than two weeks for requests for a presidential disaster declaration to be granted in the 1990s and early 2000s. That rose to about three weeks during the past decade under presidents from both major parties. During Trump’s first term in office, it took him an average of 24 days to approve requests.

White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the AP that Trump is providing “a more thorough review of disaster declaration requests than any Administration has before him” to make sure that federal tax dollars are spent wisely.

But delays mean individuals must wait to receive federal aid for daily living expenses, temporary lodging and home repairs. Delays in disaster declarations also can hamper recovery efforts by local officials uncertain whether they will receive federal reimbursement for cleaning up debris and rebuilding infrastructure.

Trump’s latest declarations approved public assistance for local governments and nonprofits in all cases except Wisconsin, where assistance for individuals was approved. But that doesn’t preclude the federal government from later also approving public assistance for Wisconsin.

Preliminary estimates from Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ administration said more than 1,500 residential structures were destroyed or suffered major damage in August flooding at a cost of more than $33 million. There was also more than $43 million in public sector damage over six counties, according to the Evers administration.

Evers requested aid for residents in six counties, but Trump approved it only for three.

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“I will continue to urge the Trump Administration to approve the remainder of my request, and I will keep fighting to make sure Wisconsin receives every resource that is needed and available,” Evers said in a statement in which he thanked Democratic officeholders for their efforts, but not Trump or any Republicans.

Trump had announced several of the disaster declarations — including Wisconsin’s — on his social media site while noting his victories in those states and highlighting their Republican officials. He received thanks from Democratic North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein and Republican officials elsewhere.

Trump’s approval of six major disaster declarations in one day would have been unusual for some presidents but not for him. Trump approved seven disaster requests on July 22 and nine on May 21.

But Trump has not approved requests for hazard mitigation assistance — a once-typical add-on that helps recipients build back with resilience — since February.

Associated Press writers Gabriela Aoun Angueira, Scott Bauer, Jack Dura and Gary D. Robertson contributed to this report.