In Brief: Nation & World: 1-24-17

Trump moves to pull US out of big Asia trade deal

WASHINGTON (AP) — Charting a new American course abroad, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership on Monday, using one of his first actions in office to reject a centerpiece of Barack Obama’s attempts to counter China and deepen U.S. ties in Asia.

For Trump, the move was a fulfillment of a central campaign promise. He has repeatedly cast the 12-nation trade pact — which was eagerly sought by U.S. allies in Asia — as detrimental to American businesses

“Great thing for the American worker that we just did,” Trump said in brief remarks as he signed a notice in the Oval Office.

The Obama administration spent years negotiating the Pacific Rim pact, though the mood in Washington on trade soured over time. Obama never sent the accord to Congress for ratification, making Trump’s actions Monday largely symbolic.

For Trump, the start of his first full week in office amounted to a reset after a tumultuous weekend dominated by his and his spokesman’s false statements about inauguration crowds and their vigorous complaints about media coverage of the celebrations. While Trump’s advisers have long accepted his tendency to become fixated on seemingly insignificant issues, some privately conceded that his focus on inauguration crowds was unhelpful on the opening weekend of his presidency.

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Tillerson heading for confirmation as secretary of state

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state headed for approval in a key Senate committee Monday after Florida Sen. Marco Rubio announced his support, backing off from a challenge to the new president.

Rubio said that despite serious reservations about former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, particularly over his views on Russia, he believed a president was entitled to significant deference in assembling his Cabinet.

“Despite my reservations, I will support Mr. Tillerson’s nomination in committee and in the full Senate,” said Rubio, who’d come under strong pressure from fellow Republicans to back the nomination and avoid dealing Trump an embarrassing setback in the early days of his presidency.

Rubio’s announcement in a statement posted on Facebook came just hours before the Foreign Relations Committee was slated to meet and vote on Tillerson’s nomination. Rubio’s support virtually assures that the nominee will move through the committee and win full Senate confirmation.

Rubio had clashed with Tillerson at a committee hearing earlier this month, bridling at his refusal to label Russian President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal” and his failure to condemn human rights violations in Saudi Arabia and the Philippines in strong enough terms. He chided Tillerson over the need for “moral clarity.” But in the end, after unsuccessfully opposing Trump for the GOP nomination last year before coming around to support him, Rubio decided to fall in line this time, too.

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Talks on Syria’s civil war off to a rocky start

ASTANA, Kazakhstan (AP) — Talks between the Syrian government and representatives of rebel factions got off to a rocky start Monday after their first face-to-face meeting in Kazakhstan that marked a major shift in the war’s dynamics and confirmed Russia’s role as regional heavyweight.

The gathering in Astana, the Kazakh capital, is the latest in a long line of diplomatic initiatives aimed at ending the nearly 6-year-old civil war, which has killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced half of Syria’s population.

The talks are focused on shoring up a shaky cease-fire declared Dec. 30, not on reaching a larger political settlement. Syria’s bitter divide was on vivid display as the delegates emerged from a closed, hour-long session marked by cold glances and sharp exchanges.

Syria’s U.N. envoy Bashar Ja’afari said the opposition delegation represented “terrorist armed groups,” and denounced the opening address delivered by the chief rebel negotiator, calling it “provocative” and “insolent.”

The head of the rebel delegation, Mohammad Alloush, had described Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government as a “terrorist” entity. He called for armed groups fighting alongside it, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, to be placed on a global list of terrorist organizations, according to a video leaked by opposition delegates.

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Marking Roe anniversary, abortion foes pin hopes on Trump

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Abortion opponents expressed optimism Monday that Donald Trump’s early months in office would advance their cause as hundreds converged on the Kansas Statehouse to mark the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

Trump, inaugurated Friday, has promised to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court with what he has called a “pro-life” justice and has said he would sign anti-abortion measures approved by the Republican-controlled Congress. Even as GOP governors and legislatures enacted a raft of new anti-abortion laws over the past decade, the movement faced a big obstacle from Democrat Barack Obama’s eight years as president.

“I have high expectations,” said Karin Capron, a 69-year-old retired chemist from the Kansas City suburb of Mission who has been active in the anti-abortion movement for more than four decades. “The more hear about him (Trump), the more I think he can be very helpful to the pro-life movement.”

Some longtime anti-abortion activists and local private school students attended the annual Rally for Life, one day after the 44th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade ruling.

The rally, which is regularly the largest annual political event at the Capitol in Topeka, was accompanied by worship services and workshops — a prelude to the movement’s paramount event, the annual March for Life on Friday in Washington.

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Bush ready to leave intensive care, wife Barbara goes home

HOUSTON (AP) — Former President George H.W. Bush is still suffering from pneumonia, but is well enough to leave the intensive care unit at a Houston hospital, doctors said Monday. His wife, Barbara, has been discharged from the same facility after completing treatment for bronchitis.

The 92-year-old former president was struggling to breathe when he was admitted to the Houston Methodist Hospital Jan. 14. Last week, he was breathing with the aid of a ventilator in the ICU, but doctors removed the breathing tube on Friday and by Monday were talking about the possibility that he could return home soon.

Dr. Amy Mynderse said at a news conference that the former president is “sitting up, watching TV and is waiting anxiously for his favorite oyster stew for lunch.”

“He’s on minimal oxygen, joking and laughing with the nurses and doctors,” she said.

Dr. Clint Doerr said Bush was still coughing “a fair amount” but that if he continues to improve, he could be discharged from the hospital by Friday or over the weekend.

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3 dogs give avalanche rescuers hope but 22 people missing

FARINDOLA, Italy (AP) — Italian emergency crews pulled three wiggling, white sheepdog puppies out Monday from under tons of snow and rubble at an avalanche-struck hotel, lifting spirits even as the search for 22 people still missing dragged on five days after the disaster.

One more body was located, raising the death toll to seven, and the first survivors of the deadly avalanche were released from the hospital. Questions intensified, however, into whether Italian authorities underestimated the risks facing the snowbound resort in the hours before the deadly avalanche.

Five days after up to 60,000 tons of snow, rocks and uprooted trees plowed into the Hotel Rigopiano in central Italy, rescue crews were still digging by hand or with shovels and chainsaws in hopes of finding more survivors. An excavator reached the site, northeast of Rome, to speed up the search.

The discovery of the three Abruzzo sheepdog puppies in the boiler room raised spirits, even as rescuers located a seventh body.

Jubilant emergency crews carried the pups out in their arms, with one firefighter burying his face in the fluffy white fur to give the dog a kiss. The puppies were born last month to the hotel’s resident sheepdogs, Nuvola and Lupo, and were prominently featured on the hotel’s Facebook page. Their parents had found their own way out after the Wednesday afternoon avalanche.

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‘The windows exploded’: Storm death toll at 20 in the South

ALBANY, Ga. (AP) — A tornado warning on television sent Anthony Mitchell, his pregnant wife and their three children scrambling for what little shelter their mobile home could provide. They crouched in a hallway as the twister started taking their home apart piece by piece.

“The windows exploded, the doors flew off the hinges, the sheetrock started to rip off the walls and fly out the windows,” Mitchell said. “The trailer started to lift up. And about that time a tree fell on the trailer, and I think that’s what held the trailer in place from flying away.”

An unusual midwinter barrage of tornadoes and thunderstorms over the weekend was blamed for at least 20 deaths across the Deep South. Among them were three people killed at Big Pine Estates, the mobile home park in Albany where the Williams family lives.

A twister slammed into the southwestern Georgia city of 76,000 people on Sunday afternoon, carving a path of destruction a half-mile wide in places and leaving the landscape strewn with broken trees and mangled sheet metal. Few of the roughly 200 homes at the trailer park escaped damage from the tornado, which was rated by forecasters as at least an EF-2, meaning it packed winds of 111 to 135 mph.

In addition to the three dead at Big Pine Estates, a fourth body was discovered at a home just outside the trailer park.

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White House press secretary: ‘Our intention is never to lie’

NEW YORK (AP) — White House press secretary Sean Spicer told a roomful of reporters that “our intention is never to lie to you,” although sometimes the Trump administration may “disagree with the facts.”

Spicer’s first full press briefing was closely watched Monday following a weekend statement about President Donald Trump’s inauguration audience that included incorrect assertions. After White House counselor Kellyanne Conway received wide social media attention for her explanation that Spicer had presented “alternative facts,” Monday’s briefing was televised live on CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and, for a time, even ABC.

Meanwhile, ABC announced that anchor David Muir would interview Trump for a one-hour prime-time special to air at 10 p.m. EST Wednesday.

Spicer tried to defuse tension by opening with a self-deprecating joke about his lack of popularity, and his 78-minute session was wide-ranging and mostly substantive. He corrected one disputed statement from Saturday, defended another and expressed some frustration regarding how the new Trump administration feels about its news coverage.

Asked for a pledge not to lie, Spicer assented, saying, “I believe we have to be honest with the American people.” He said he had received incorrect information about Inauguration day ridership on the Washington Metro system when he initially claimed the system was used more Friday than for Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration.

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Caught napping: Baseball hitting, pitching sapped by jet lag

NEW YORK (AP) — Researchers say they’ve documented an unseen drag on major league baseball players that can wipe out home field advantage, make pitchers give up more home runs, and take some punch out of a team’s bats.

The culprit: jet lag.

Travelers are well aware of the fatigue, poor sleep and other effects that can descend like a fog when their body clocks are out of sync with their surroundings. The new work adds to previous suggestions that professional athletes are no different.

Dr. Ravi Allada of Northwestern University said he and his colleagues wanted to study the effects of body clock disruptions on human performance. So they chose baseball, a game with plenty of performance measures gathered from hundreds of games a year, played by people who get little chance to settle in to new time zones when they travel.

They looked for jet lag’s effects by analyzing 20 years’ worth of Major League Baseball data. They found 4,919 instances of a team taking the field after crossing two or three time zones but without enough time to adjust. People generally need a day of adjustment for each time zone crossed.

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Fate of Polish WWII museum unclear amid battle over history

GDANSK, Poland (AP) — It was supposed to be the first museum in the world to tell the story of World War II in its entirety by focusing on all the nations caught up in that global conflict. But it has fallen foul of changing political priorities in its Polish home, and as it opened its doors for the first time Monday, it’s facing an uncertain future.

After nine years of work, the Museum of the Second World War opened in Gdansk for one day to reporters, historians, veterans and donors. Director Pawel Machcewicz hoped the world could get a glimpse of it as he races against the clock to get it finished before he is pushed out of his job, something he believes is inevitable.

The project was launched in 2008 by then-Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who is today one of the European Union’s top leaders. Aside from its global approach, the creators of the state museum say it is different from most other war museums in that it puts civilian suffering — not military campaigns — at the heart of the narrative.

But the political climate in Poland has changed dramatically since then, with a nationalist and populist government in charge that deeply objects to its approach and wants to take control over the institution to change its content. Members of the ruling Law and Justice party say they want a museum that focuses solely on the Polish experience, with primacy given to the heroism of Polish soldiers who resisted the Germans.

“We are being attacked as a museum that is not Polish enough,” Machcewicz said.