AP News in Brief 07-29-18

Fire claims 2 children, great-grandmother

REDDING, Calif. — The death count from a rapidly growing Northern California wildfire rose to five Saturday after two young children and their great-grandmother who had been unaccounted for were confirmed dead.

“My babies are dead,” Sherry Bledsoe said through tears after she and family members met with Shasta County sheriff’s deputies.

Bledsoe’s two children, James Roberts, 5, and Emily Roberts, 4, were stranded with her grandmother Melody Bledsoe, 70, when walls of flames swept through the family’s rural property Thursday on the outskirts of Redding.

The three were among more than a dozen people reported missing after the furious wind-driven blaze took residents by surprise and leveled several neighborhoods.

Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko said he expects to find several of those people alive and just out of touch with loved ones. Officers have gone to homes of several people reported missing and found cars gone — a strong indication they fled.

No mystery to Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh’s gun views

SILVER SPRING, Md. — Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh says he recognizes that gun, drug and gang violence “has plagued all of us.” Still, he believes the Constitution limits how far government can go to restrict gun use to prevent crime.

As a federal appeals court judge, Kavanaugh made it clear in a 2011 dissent that he thinks Americans can keep most guns, even the AR-15 rifles used in some of the deadliest mass shootings.

Kavanaugh’s nomination by President Donald Trump has delighted Second Amendment advocates. Gun law supporters worry that his ascendancy to America’s highest court would make it harder to curb the proliferation of guns. Kavanaugh has the support of the National Rifle Association, which posted a photograph of Kavanaugh and Trump across the top of its website.

The Supreme Court has basically stayed away from major guns cases since its rulings in 2008 and 2010 declared a right to have a gun, at least in the home for the purpose of self-defense.

Gun rights advocates believe Kavanaugh interprets the Second Amendment right to bear arms more broadly than does Anthony Kennedy, the justice he would replace. As a first step, some legal experts expect Kavanaugh would be more likely to vote for the court to hear a case that could expand the right to gun ownership or curtail a gun control law.

Editor calls Capital Gazette victims ‘friends of the people’

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The five Capital Gazette employees killed in an attack in their newsroom last month were “friends of the people,” and “not one of them deserved to be seen as an enemy,” the executive editor of The Washington Post said Saturday at a benefit concert for the victims’ families and colleagues.

While Martin Baron didn’t mention President Donald Trump by name while speaking to an audience from the concert stage, he clearly had the president in mind. Trump has repeatedly denounced the press as the “enemy” of the American people.

Baron spoke of all five of the victims by name, and he described them as “friends of the people, the people of Annapolis and beyond.”

“Not one of them deserved to be seen as an enemy because of the profession they choose or the place they worked,” Baron said to applause from the audience. “Not one of them deserved to be seen as an enemy by the man who killed them, and not one of them deserved to be called an enemy by anyone else, either: Nor does anyone else in our field deserve to be labeled that way.”

From wire sources

Baron added: “To demean people like these, to demonize, to dehumanize them, is to debase yourself.”

On trade policy, Trump is turning GOP orthodoxy on its head

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s trade policies are turning long-established Republican orthodoxy on its head, marked by tariff fights and now $12 billion in farm aid that represents the type of government intervention GOP voters railed against a decade ago.

President George W. Bush increased the number of countries partnering with the United States on free trade agreements from three to 16. President Ronald Reagan signed a landmark trade deal with Canada that was later transformed into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and expanded to include Mexico. Both those Republican presidents also enacted tariffs, but their comments on trade were overwhelmingly positive.

“We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends, weakening our economy, our national security and the entire free world, all while cynically waiving the American flag,” Reagan said in a 1988 radio address.

Trump, by comparison, has called NAFTA “the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere,” and his administration has opted to use tariffs as a tool intended to leverage more favorable agreements with virtually every major U.S. trading partner. He shredded the trade agreement the Obama administration tried to work out with Pacific Rim nations that had strong backing from farm groups and chief executives from major U.S. corporations.

Republicans also have altered the priority of tackling the national debt, an issue the GOP hammered President Barack Obama on as the country struggled to recover from the 2008 economic crisis. “Our nation is approaching a tipping point,” GOP Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, now the House speaker, said in January 2011 when the national debt hit $14 trillion.

Pope accepts resignation of McCarrick after sex abuse claims

VATICAN CITY — In a move seen as unprecedented, Pope Francis has effectively stripped U.S. prelate Theodore McCarrick of his cardinal’s title following allegations of sexual abuse, including one involving an 11-year-old boy. The Vatican announced Saturday that Francis ordered McCarrick to conduct a “life of prayer and penance” before a church trial is held.

Breaking with past practice, Francis decided to act swiftly on the resignation offered by the emeritus archbishop of Washington, D.C., even before the accusations are investigated by church officials. McCarrick was previously one of the highest, most visible Catholic church officials in the United States and was heavily involved in the church’s yearslong response to allegations of priestly abuse there.

Francis received McCarrick’s letter offering to resign from the College of Cardinals on Friday evening, after a spate of allegations that the 88-year-old prelate had for years sexually abused boys and had sexual misconduct with adult seminarians.

The pope then ordered McCarrick’s “suspension from the exercise of any public ministry, together with the obligation to remain in a house yet to be indicated to him, for a life of prayer and penance until the accusations made against him are examined in a regular canonical trial,” the Vatican said.

The McCarrick case posed a test of the pontiff’s recently declared resolve to battle what he called a “culture of cover-up” of similar abuses in the Catholic church’s hierarchy.

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USGS: Magnitude-6.4 quake strikes Indonesia’s Lombok island

JAKARTA, Indonesia — A strong earthquake has struck Indonesia’s Lombok island, which is not far from the tourist destination of Bali.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had a magnitude of 6.4 and its epicenter was 1.4 kilometers (0.8 miles) southwest of Lelongken, Indonesia. It had a depth of 7 kilometers (4.4 miles).

Authorities issued a yellow alert, which suggested that some casualties are a possiblity.

Indonesia is prone to earthquakes due to its location on the Pacific “Ring of Fire,” an arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin. In December 2004, a massive magnitude-9.1 earthquake off Sumatra triggered a tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries.

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Police: Texas mall robbery suspects nabbed; no shots fired

McALLEN, Texas — Glass cases being smashed during an attempted robbery Saturday at a jewelry store in a popular Texas mall were misconstrued as gunfire and sent people running for the exits, authorities and witnesses said.

All known suspects in the attempted robbery at the La Plaza Mall in McAllen were taken into custody, the city’s police chief, Victor Rodriguez, said in a statement that the city government posted on Twitter.

Madeline Madden, a 17-year-old from McAllen, told The Monitor of McAllen that she was inside Glitz and Glamour, a boutique just across from the mall, when she saw people rush out of the mall and into the parking lot.

She said one frightened couple ran into the boutique seeking safety.

“The man and his wife came in with their kids and asked if they were going to lock the door, and they told us what happened … that there had been a shooting,” Madden said. “They were trying to get away. The wife was crying and the man looked really nervous. They had a newborn and a toddler with them, and the toddler was crying. Someone else came and had cuts all over them from falling. We had to lock the doors and wouldn’t let anyone else into the store.”

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Heartbreak: Funerals begin for Greece’s wildfire victims

ATHENS, Greece — Funerals for the victims of Greece’s lethal wildfire began Saturday with the burial of an elderly priest who drowned as he sought safety from the flames in the sea off the coastal community of Mati.

Hundreds of people attended Father Spyridon Papapostolou’s funeral in his parish of Halandri, a northern suburb of Athens, the Greek capital.

Papapostolou, his wife and daughter were among hundreds who entered the water to protect themselves from the fast-moving flames. But the 83-year-old cleric passed out and drowned, while his wife and daughter survived.

“Father Spyridon was certainly ready for this trip, but not in this way, he didn’t deserve it,” his niece, Ifigenia Christodoulou, told The Associated Press. “I hope that he prays for all us from up there, just as he has done all these years.”

Dimitra Bavavea directed her anger at the “unjust” way that so many people — 86 — had lost their lives. The fire was the deadliest wildfire in Europe since 1900, according to the International Disaster Database run by the Centre for the Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters in Brussels.

Dolls, bicycles among charred belongings from Greek blaze

MATI, Greece — The soot-smothered mermaid doll lying among the detritus of a fire-gutted home may have been in a child’s hands just before the flames swept through.

The little canary’s chirps were probably silenced just as the fire’s chocking smoke engulfed its tiny cage. All that remains of a bicycle that was once a child’s pride and joy is now a blackened hulk. And a singed soccer ball with a Chelsea logo won’t be used again for another kid’s pick-up game.

These are a few of the personal items left strewn among the burnt-out remains of hundreds of homes in the Greek coastal resort community of Mati that was devastated by Monday’s wildfire. They bear silent witness to a resort teeming with life as many families enjoyed their summer holidays.

More than 86 people were either killed by the flames or drowned as they tried to flee the fire into the nearby sea, waiting for hours in the water for rescue from local fishermen and other boat owners.

The speed with which the fire swept through the area 30 kilometers (18 miles) east of the capital of Athens was something never encountered before, firefighters and first responders said.