Former Klan leader at center of latest GOP campaign joust
LEESBURG, Va. — Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is drawing criticism for refusing to denounce an implicit endorsement from former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, with Marco Rubio using the matter to hammer the billionaire businessman ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries.
Trump was asked Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether he rejected support from the former KKK Grand Dragon and other white supremacists after Duke told his radio followers this week that a vote against Trump was equivalent to “treason to your heritage.”
“Well, just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke. OK?” Trump told host Jake Tapper. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.”
The comments sparked a wave of censures with just two days to go before 11 states hold GOP primaries involving about a quarter of the party’s total nominating delegate count.
Trump was asked Friday by journalists how he felt about Duke’s support. He said he didn’t know anything about it and curtly said: “All right, I disavow, ok?”
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As protests swirl, Oscars have feel of high-stakes showdown
LOS ANGELES — Hollywood is bracing for an Academy Awards that more than any in recent memory, has the feel of a high-stakes showdown.
After a second straight year of all-white acting nominees prompted industry-wide scrutiny, viewers and stars alike are hanging on the opening words of host Chris Rock. The Dolby Theatre ceremony, heavily guarded by security, stands at the center of a swirling storm over diversity in the movies and at the Oscars, with protests planned near the red carpet and some viewers organizing a boycott of the broadcast.
The Academy Awards, normally decorous and predictable, are this year charged with enough politics and uncertainty to rival an election debate. Arrivals for the 88th annual Academy Awards are expected to begin as early as 5 p.m. EST, with the ceremony kicking off at 8:30 p.m. EST on ABC.
The night’s top honor, best picture, is considered one of the most hard-to-call categories. The three major guild awards — the Screen Actors, the Directors and the Producers — have spread their top honors among three films seen as the front-runners: Alejandro Inarritu’s frontier epic “The Revenant,” Adam McKay’s financial meltdown tale “The Big Short” and Tom McCarthy’s newsroom drama “Spotlight.”
“The Revenant,” buoyed by big box office and a win at the BAFTAs, is seen as the one with the most momentum and has the best odds in Las Vegas. Its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, appears to be a shoo-in to land his first Academy Award in his fifth nomination. Back-to-back best picture wins for “Birdman” director Inarritu would be unprecedented.
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Opposition activists report airstrikes in northern Syria
BEIRUT — Warplanes carried out Sunday air raids on two villages in northern Syria as Russia said a northern town held by a predominantly Kurdish militia came under fire from the Turkish side of the border.
Sunday’s air raids came on the second day of a cease-fire brokered by Russia and the U.S., the most ambitious effort yet to curb the violence of the country’s five-year civil war. The truce has been holding since it went into effect at midnight Friday despite accusations by both sides of violations.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the airstrikes hit the villages of Daret Azzeh and Qobtan al-Jabal. The group did not say whether the warplanes were Russian or Syrian.
The Local Coordination Committees said the warplanes were Russian.
It was not immediately clear if the warplanes struck areas controlled by al-Qaida’s branch in Syria, known as the Nusra Front. Both the Nusra Front and the Islamic State group are excluded from the truce.
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States reduce jobless checks, adding pressure to unemployed
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — When Demetrius White recently lost his job as a $10-an-hour forklift driver loading pallets of shampoo, he applied for unemployment benefits to help support his family.
That aid will not last as long as it once did, because White is among the first group of people affected by a new Missouri law reducing the duration of jobless benefits. His $200-a-week checks will last no more than three months — just half as long as what has typically been available.
“That’s a dramatic change, really,” White said. “Thirteen weeks, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find a job.”
States traditionally have offered up to half a year of aid for the unemployed as they search for new jobs. But since the end of the Great Recession, eight states have reduced the number of weeks that people can draw benefits, while others have cut the amount of money the unemployed can collect.
The cutbacks generally are intended to help shore up unemployment insurance trust funds, which went insolvent in 35 states following the recession that began in 2008. The changes could save hundreds of millions of dollars for businesses that pay unemployment taxes.
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Trump: Judge’s ethnicity matters in Trump University suit
BENTONVILLE, Ark. — Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump is trying to deflect attention from a class-action civil lawsuit involving the former Trump University by pointing to the ethnic background of the judge in the case.
Asked on “Fox News Sunday” what U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s ethnicity has to do with the lawsuit against him, Trump replied:
“I think it has to do perhaps with the fact that I’m very, very strong on the border, very, very strong at the border, and he has been extremely hostile to me,” Trump said.
According to the California class-action complaint in front of Curiel, a one-year apprenticeship that Trump University students were promised ended after students paid for a three-day seminar. Attendees who were promised a personal photo with Trump received only the chance to take a photo with a cardboard cutout. And many instructors were bankrupt real estate investors.
Trump University emerged as a campaign issue at Thursday’s GOP debate, raised by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
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Twin bombing attacks in Baghdad market kill at least 59
BAGHDAD — Militants attacked an outdoor market on Sunday in eastern Baghdad, killing at least 59 people and wounding nearly 100, officials said.
A bomb ripped through the crowded Mredi market in the Shiite district of Sadr City, a police officer said. Minutes later, a suicide bomber blew himself up amid the crowd that had gathered at the site of the first bombing, he added.
Interior Ministry spokesman Sad Main said the bombings killed 38 people and wounded another 62.
Multiple hospital officials later increased the casualty toll to 59 dead and 95 wounded. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.
The attack was the deadliest in a wave of recent explosions that have targeted commercial areas in and outside Baghdad.
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3 stabbed when violence erupts at KKK rally in California
LOS ANGELES — Dozens of protesters who heard about a planned Ku Klux Klan rally were waiting by a Southern California park when six Klansmen pulled up in a black SUV and took out signs reading “White Lives Matter.” The KKK members were dressed in black shirts decorated with the Klan cross and Confederate flag patches.
The protesters immediately moved in, surrounding the Klansmen. Someone smashed the SUV’s window, and then mayhem ensued.
Witness video captured the brawl just after noon Saturday in an Anaheim park about 3 miles from Disneyland. Several protesters could be seen kicking a KKK member. One Klansman with an American flag used the pole’s tip to stab a man.
“I got stabbed,” the man screamed, lifting his T-shirt to show a wound to his stomach. A fire hydrant where the man briefly sat was covered in blood.
By the time ordered was restored, three people had been stabbed, one critically. Five Klansmen were booked for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon, and seven of the approximately 30 counter-protesters were arrested on suspicion of assault with force likely to cause great bodily injury.
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First Iran vote after nuclear deal gives reformists momentum
TEHRAN, Iran — Iranian reformists appear have won all 30 seats representing the nation’s capital in parliament, a definitive rebuke to the hard-liners opposing President Hassan Rouhani’s efforts to open the economy and cooperate with the West.
In the first elections held since last year’s nuclear deal, none of Iran’s three main political camps — reformists, conservatives and hard-liners — is expected to win an outright majority in the 290-seat parliament, but early results indicate the best reformist showing in more than a decade.
Moderate conservatives also gained seats, and if their tentative coalition with the reformists holds, they could end the domination of parliament by hard-liners who were opposed to the nuclear deal. The reformist gains reflect strong public support for the agreement’s promise of more economic opportunities now that the West has dropped crippling sanctions in exchange for limiting the nation’s nuclear program.
State television said Friday’s vote heralds “the end of the presence of a powerful majority in the parliament that overshadowed decision-making apparatus in the country over the past decade.”
Rouhani thanked voters Saturday night in a message that encouraged Iranians to help him end the nation’s isolation.
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Rubio shifts to the offensive in an effort to slow Trump
KENNESAW, Georgia — A flood of mainstream Republican officials and donors have lined up behind Marco Rubio in the week since former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush suspended his campaign for president.
And yet Rubio’s team concedes that neither the influx of support, nor the conversion of many of Bush’s wealthy donors, is enough to stop Donald Trump.
Instead of riding the wave of new support alone, Rubio has been forced to speed up plans for an all-out assault on the billionaire businessman’s character.
Rubio had hoped to wait until the chaotic Republican nominating campaign had shrunk to a two-man race. But with a growing sense of urgency among GOP stalwarts to settle on a Trump alternative, the young Florida senator is trying to simultaneously slow Trump and cast himself the savior of the party’s future.
“I will never quit. I will never stop until we keep a con man from taking over the party of Reagan and the conservative movement,” Rubio thundered at a rally with 2,000 people in Oklahoma City on Friday.
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Zika outbreak concerns some athletes planning families
New Zealander middle-distance runner Nick Willis and his wife already have a toddler, and they’re looking to add to their family. Concern over the Zika virus is putting those plans on hold.
Willis, the 2008 Olympic silver medalist in the 1,500 meters, hopes to compete this summer at the games in Rio de Janeiro. Wife Sierra is one of his coaches.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations about the Zika virus. … We have a 2½-year-old son, my wife and I, and we’d like to add to that family and grow it,” Willis said. “The biggest impact, I suppose, is we’ve decided not to try to get pregnant now.”
Willis, 32, suggested that perhaps he’d consider freezing his sperm until the couple knows more about the virus. Like many athletes headed to Brazil this summer, he is refusing to let Zika derail his Olympic dreams. Most say they are trusting federations to make sure they are safe, although one medal hopeful is warning a vulnerable relative to stay home.
The husband of American Jenn Suhr, who holds the world indoor record for the pole vault and won the gold at the 2012 Olympics, said a cousin canceled plans to go to Brazil this summer to watch Suhr jump because the cousin has one child and is expecting another.