Across the Nation

Eds: APNewsNow. Will be led.

WASHINGTON — A federal grand jury has indicted the white supremacist accused of fatally shooting a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Hate crimes charges have been added to the case against James von Brunn, who has been in a hospital since the shooting last month.

Officials say the 89-year-old shot and killed museum guard Stephen T. Johns. Von Brunn was shot in the face by other guards.

A seven-count indictment was handed up Wednesday in U.S. District Court, charging von Brunn with first-degree murder, killing in a federal building — both charges already lodged against von Brunn — and bias-motivated crime. The case has sparked renewed calls for expanded hate crimes legislation.

Democrats, GOP spar

over Sotomayor vote

WASHINGTON — The Senate debate over Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor turned bitter Wednesday, after Democrats warned the GOP it would pay a steep price for opposing the judge who would be the first Hispanic justice, and a top Republican charged they were playing destructive racial politics.

Majority Leader Harry Reid implored Republicans Wednesday to join Democrats in voting to confirm Sotomayor next week, warning that GOP opposition would bring the same sort of public backlash that followed the party’s spirited opposition to measures that would have given some illegal immigrants a chance to gain legal status.

"I just think that their voting against this good woman is going to treat them about the same way that they got treated as a result of their votes on immigration,” said Reid, D-Nev.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, the head of his party’s Senate campaign committee and a Sotomayor opponent, shot back that Reid and other Democrats were trying to exploit the nomination and "giving cover to groups and individuals to nurture racial grievances for political advantage.”

"I don’t think it influences people’s votes, but what it does encourage is a very poisonous — indeed a very toxic — tone of destructive politics,” Cornyn told the Associated Press. "They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

U.S. says prepared to release young Gitmo detainee

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration said Wednesday it was prepared to release one of the youngest prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay, days after signaling it might bring him to the United States for a criminal trial.

Government attorneys asked a federal judge to give them three weeks to release Mohammed Jawad. He’s been held at the U.S. naval facility in Cuba for nearly seven years since being arrested for allegedly wounding two U.S. soldiers and their interpreter by throwing a grenade at their jeep in Afghanistan.

Just last Friday, the Justice Department said it wanted to hold Jawad at Guantanamo while conducting a criminal investigation, saying it had new eyewitness evidence and would speed up a grand jury investigation.

In the newest court filing, prosecutors also held out the possibility that they could turn over Jawad to another country rather than bring him to the U.S. for trial. Jawad’s lawyers have been trying for years to get him released to his native Afghanistan.

But the filings did not make clear which direction the prosecutors would try to take, and a federal judge could force them to choose ahead of the three-week schedule determined partly by Congress and partly by the complicated legal and flight logistics of sending him from a U.S. military base in Cuba to Afghanistan.

Justice Department officials did not immediately comment on the filing.