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NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Eric Adams launched a legal attack on the federal corruption case against him Monday, with his attorney asking a judge to toss out bribery charges and then holding a combative news conference accusing prosecutors of ethical lapses.

Adams, a Democrat, pleaded not guilty Friday to charges that he accepted lavish travel benefits and illegal campaign contributions from a Turkish official and other foreign nationals, and in return performed favors including pushing through the opening of a Turkish consulate building.

The mayor’s attorneys said in a motion filed early Monday that the cheap flights to overseas destinations, seat upgrades, free meals and free hotel rooms he got were not bribes, as that crime has been defined by federal law.

“Congressmen get upgrades, they get corner suites, they get better tables at restaurants, they get free appetizers, they have their iced tea filled up,” his attorney, Alex Spiro, said at a subsequent news conference. “Courtesies to politicians are not federal crimes.”

While not disputing that Adams accepted flight upgrades and deeply-discounted or free travel, Spiro said his client had never promised to take action on behalf of the Turkish government in exchange for the perks, which prosecutors say were worth more than $100,000.

“There was no quid pro quo. There was no this for that,” Spiro said.

The mayor has vowed to continue serving while fighting the charges, which he has suggested — without providing evidence — are politically motivated.

On top of the case against Adams, federal prosecutors are believed to be leading separate ongoing investigations into several top city officials with deep ties to the mayor. The drumbeat of searches and subpoenas in recent weeks has prompted the resignation of the city’s police commissioner and schools chancellor, along with some calls for the mayor to resign.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat who has the power to remove Adams from office, told reporters Monday that she had spoken to the mayor about “what my expectations are” but also indicated she wasn’t ready to give up on his administration.

“I am giving the mayor an opportunity now to demonstrate to New Yorkers — and to me — that we are righting the ship, that we have the opportunity to instill the confidence that I think is wavering right now and to power forward with an effective government,” she said.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, whose office brought the case, has said that politics played no role. At a news conference on an unrelated topic Monday, Williams declined to comment on Spiro’s remarks, saying prosecutors would speak through its court filings going forward.

Prosecutors say Adams accepted at least seven free and steeply discounted flights, along with luxury hotel stays, high-end meals, entertainment and illegal foreign donations, from a Turkish official and others seeking to buy his influence.

In September 2021, the official sought to cash in on the favors by asking Adams to expedite the opening of the 36-story Manhattan consulate building, which fire safety inspectors said was not safe to occupy, ahead of an important state visit by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to the indictment.

Adams then sent a series of text messages to the fire commissioner pushing for him to open the building — something that Spiro also did not dispute.

At the time, Adams was still serving as Brooklyn borough president, a largely ceremonial position, but had already won the mayoral primary and was widely expected to become mayor.

Prosecutors said Adams did not disclose most of the free or heavily discounted trips he took while borough president, as required by city conflict-of-interest laws.

At the news conference, Spiro initially said Adams was not legally obligated to disclose any of the trips or upgrades, but later acknowledged — after reporters noted city rules that required some types of gifts and travel perks to be reported — that he was not an expert in the city’s conflict-of-interest law.

Defense attorneys claim the additional charges against Adams — that he solicited and accepted foreign donations and manipulated the city’s matching funds program — would soon be revealed as “equally meritless.”

They said a former Adams staffer had lied to prosecutors to make it seem like the mayor had firsthand knowledge of the illegal donations.

“Eventually New Yorkers, being New Yorkers, are going to wise up to all this,” Spiro said.

Adams is due back in court Wednesday for a conference.

Ottawa must do more to help Canadian citizens leave Lebanon, says the son of a Canadian couple killed last week when an Israeli bomb hit their car in the country’s south.

Speaking from Bahrain in a phone interview, Kamal Tabaja said he’s having trouble sleeping knowing that more family members, including his Canadian brother, are struggling to find a safe route out of the country.

“With the Canadians remaining there, they should start evacuating, sending their own planes or boats,” Tabaja said.

The federal government has been working on plans for a possible military evacuation for months, but for now, Global Affairs Canada is urging people to leave on their own while there are still options to do so.

Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly has said some 45,000 Canadians could be in the country, though only about half that number have registered with the embassy in Beirut.

On Friday, the department began booking blocks of seats on commercial flights headed from Beirut to other countries. Canadian passengers are responsible for finding their way back to Canada from those locations.

It will be about two weeks before Tabaja’s brother, who lives in Beirut, can catch a flight, he said.

“You just need to try and hold strong,” Tabaja said he tells his brother. “You have to keep fighting. You have to survive until this is over.”

The Lebanese health ministry estimates that Israeli strikes have killed more than a thousand people over the past couple of weeks in a major escalation of hostilities between Israel and the Hezbollah militant group, which have been exchanging fire since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war last October.

With both Israel and Hezbollah vowing to continue their fight, other Western countries have started to ramp up exit plans for their citizens amid fears of an even broader regional conflict.

Some European countries began pulling diplomats and citizens out of Lebanon on Monday, with Germany using a military plane.

Tabaja said Ottawa should be doing much more — not just to evacuate citizens, but to condemn the ongoing violence and help prevent more civilians from getting hurt.

Global Affairs Canada did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Joly has said an immediate ceasefire is needed and “there must be no war” in Lebanon.

She said on social media last week that she spoke to Tabaja and his brother after the deaths of their parents, 75-year-old father Hussein Tabaja and 70-year-old mother Daad Tabaja.

“I condemn the killing of these two innocent people who were fleeing violence in an (Israel Defense Forces) strike,” Joly wrote. “We refuse to let civilians bear the cost of this conflict.”

Kamal Tabaja said he called his parents last Monday and encouraged them to flee their southern Lebanon village in the Nabatieh District.

“I said, ‘This is not normal, I think it’s time to leave,'” Tabaja recalled. “Everybody was stuck in traffic for about six to seven hours … it was like a bottleneck. Everybody was stuck there.”

He said he and his brother began to worry when, after last speaking with them sometime in the evening, midnight came with no update from their parents. They started contacting local hospitals and putting out calls for help on social media, he said.

That’s how they learned of an incinerated vehicle in the vicinity of Israeli bombings.

It fit the description of their parents’ vehicle. The licence plate was a match. His mother’s watch was found in the wreckage.

Tabaja said the bodies of his parents were officially identified at a hospital on Saturday through DNA testing, and they were buried later that day. No one could attend the burial because most of their family members in Lebanon were displaced because of the conflict, he said. That included his brother.

“I said, ‘I don’t want you to go. I don’t want to bury more people,'” he said.

The family immigrated to Canada in the late ’80s to flee the Lebanese civil war, he said. They were initially denied permanent residency and returned to Lebanon for a time, but came back later as refugees and were able to obtain citizenship.

They lived in Ottawa, he said. Eventually, they moved back to Lebanon to help his ailing maternal grandparents, he said, but they would frequently come back to visit.

Tabaja said he’s in “complete denial” about the death of his parents, and he wants them to be remembered as “loving and giving people.” They loved the outdoors, he said, and spending time with their family.

“I have a lot of memories of my father and my mother in parks, rivers, lakes, both in Lebanon and Canada,” he said. “I cherish all these images in my mind. They were happy people.”

For Tabaja, an end to the violence can’t come soon enough. He said he’s received an outpouring of support from around the world following the death of his parents.

“People loved them,” he said. “Everywhere they went, they left a mark.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 30, 2024.

— With files from The Associated Press.

MONTREAL – A group of 23 bilingual municipalities asked a Quebec Superior Court judge on Monday to suspend several portions of the province’s 2022 language reform, arguing that the application of the law will cause them serious and irreparable harm.

Lawyer Julius Grey told the Montreal courtroom that the law contains measures that will have “enormous consequences” for cities that have the right to serve citizens in both English and French. Municipalities without official bilingual status are prohibited from communicating with residents in English.

Meanwhile, a government lawyer said Grey’s arguments are based on fear and have “no legal basis or factual basis.”

Grey said the law could prevent cities from writing contracts in English, would grant the government the ability to withhold federal subsidies to cities that don’t comply, and would give the language watchdog vast powers of search and seizure that exceed those of police.

“The (Quebec language office) can demand any documents, inspect whatever they want to,” Grey said. “It’s much more than the police can do without a warrant.”

He said the law gives the language watchdog — Office québécois de la langue française — the right to seize materials which could include employees’ personal information, budget documents and even legal advice that should be protected under attorney-client privilege. It would also require municipalities to discipline employees who don’t conform, he said.

Grey asked the judge to suspend the application of several provisions until a full hearing can be held on the validity of the law, for which the government proactively invoked the notwithstanding clause to shield it from some court challenges.

In court, Grey said that some of the municipalities involved in the challenge are overwhelmingly composed of English-speakers, and suggested it would be hard under the law for them to finalize contracts or continue to have unilingual anglophone employees.

Outside the courtroom, he said those potential harms amount to “serious prejudice” against the towns and cities.

“The contracts, the vast power of search and seizure, the federal subsidies that are given out and the duty to discipline are all things which should await a final decision on what the rules are,” he said.

For its part, the Quebec government, represented by lawyer Charles Gravel, told Justice Silvana Conte that the municipalities haven’t provided any evidence that they’ve been harmed by the law. There’s no proof any seizures have happened, he said, or that subsidies have been cut, and the cities’ concern shouldn’t be enough to suspend the law without evidence it’s caused any harm.

“You can’t mix up apprehensions and facts,” he said.

Gravel said many of the towns’ concerns — including their contention that they won’t be able to have unilingual English employees — are overblown and not supported by the text of law.

He also contends that municipalities are “creatures of the provincial legislator” and therefore they have no jurisdiction over administrative measures such as contracts. Municipalities, he added, weren’t created with a role of protecting language, suggesting they had no foundation to challenge language laws.

“The municipal administration only has the powers conferred on them by provincial legislative measures,” he said.

Later on Monday, in his response to Gravel’s arguments, Grey told the court that municipalities don’t have to show that they have already been harmed by the law — only that the risk of harm is real.

The 23 municipalities include several Montreal suburbs such as Westmount and Côte-St-Luc, as well as smaller communities located mostly near the borders with the United States or the boundaries with other provinces, including New Brunswick or Ontario.

Steven Erdelyi, a city councillor for the Montreal-area city of Côte-St-Luc, said his municipality receives $3 million to $4 million a year in grants, mostly originating federally, which help pay for infrastructure.

“At a moment’s notice, the minister responsible for the French language could cut the grants for the 23 bilingual cities that accounts for $110 million over four years,” he said outside the courtroom.

Erdelyi said that while the city isn’t aware of any subsidy cuts or search and seizures having happened so far, he feels the language watchdog has been targeting his city by increasing inspections of local businesses. “It’s important for us to take a stand on this and we will continue to fight this to the fullest extent of the law,” he said.

The mayor of Bonne-Espérance, a 695-person town near the Labrador border, said in a news release that the section of the law stating contracts must be in French has led to a lot of confusion.

“It’s absurd that for our municipality, where 99 per cent of the population has English as their preferred language, we cannot produce contracts with suppliers in our community in English,” Dale Roberts-Keats said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 30, 2024.