In Brief: Nation & World: 1-30-17

White House: Immigration order ‘small price’ for safety

WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House on Sunday tried to tamp down concerns about President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration order in the face of widespread protests, as some Republicans in Congress urged him to proceed with caution in the face of legal pushback. Top congressional Republicans, however, remain largely behind the new president.

During a round of Sunday show interviews, Trump’s aides stressed that just a small portion of travelers had been affected by the order, which temporarily bars the citizens of seven majority Muslim nations from entering the country. The aides also reversed course and said that citizens of those countries who hold permanent U.S. residency “green cards” will not be barred from re-entering the country, as officials had previously said.

“I can’t imagine too many people out there watching this right now think it’s unreasonable to ask a few more questions from someone traveling in and out of Libya and Yemen before being let loose in the United States,” insisted Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus. “And that’s all this is.”

As of Sunday afternoon, one legal permanent resident had been denied entry to the country as a result of the order, according to a federal law enforcement official. The official was not permitted to discuss the order’s impact publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The changes, said White House adviser Kellyanne Conway, are “a small price to pay” to keep the nation safe.

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Trump travel ban sows chaos at airports, outrage at protests

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s immigration order sowed more chaos and outrage across the country Sunday, with travelers detained at airports, panicked families searching for relatives and protesters registering opposition to the sweeping measure that was blocked by several federal courts.

Attorneys struggled to determine how many people had been affected so far by the rules, which Trump said Saturday were “working out very nicely.”

But critics described widespread confusion, with an untold number of travelers being held in legal limbo because of ill-defined procedures. Lawyers manned tables at New York’s Kennedy Airport to offer help to families whose loved ones had been detained, and some 150 Chicago-area lawyers showed up at O’Hare Airport after getting an email asking for legal assistance on behalf of travelers.

“We just simply don’t know how many people there are and where they are,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

Advocates for travelers say the chaos is likely to continue. The executive director of National Immigration Law Center, Marielena Hincapie, said “this is just the beginning.”

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Military: First-known combat death since Trump in office

SANAA, Yemen (AP) — A U.S. military service member was killed Sunday during a raid against al-Qaida militants in central Yemen that also left nearly 30 others dead, including women and children. The loss of the service member is the first-known combat death of a member of the U.S. military under President Donald Trump.

“Americans are saddened this morning with news that a life of a heroic service member has been taken in our fight against the evil of radical Islamic terrorism,” Trump said in a statement.

The U.S. has been striking al-Qaida in Yemen from the air for more than 15 years, mostly using drones, and Sunday’s surprise pre-dawn raid could signal a new escalation against extremist groups in the Arab world’s poorest but strategically located country.

An al-Qaida official and an online news service linked to the terror group said the raid left about 30 people dead. Among the children killed was Anwaar, the 8-year-old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Yemeni-American cleric killed in a U.S. airstrike in Yemen in 2011, according to the girl’s grandfather.

Nasser al-Awlaki told The Associated Press that Anwaar was visiting her mother when the raid took place. She was shot in the neck and bled for two hours before she died, he said.

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Hard work starts now for France’s Socialist candidate

PARIS (AP) — Beating a politically weakened ex-prime minister proved easy for Benoit Hamon, who will represent France’s ruling Socialist Party in the country’s presidential election. Far harder will be convincing voters that his hard-left platform isn’t the recipe for ruin his critics claim.

Hamon’s comfortable victory Sunday in a Socialist primary runoff against Manuel Valls owed much to his radical proposal to give all French adults a regular monthly income to protect them in an automated future where machines will take their jobs.

Hamon’s winning margin — nearly 59 percent of the votes in the three-quarters of polling stations tallied — also appeared as a resounding rejection of unpopular outgoing President Francois Hollande and Valls, his prime minister for more than two years.

But the path forward for Hamon is littered with obstacles.

First, he will have to unite the Socialists behind him, which could be heavy lifting. Divisions are deep between the party’s hard-left wing, which consistently criticized Hollande and Valls policies, and the advocates of more center-left views.

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Religious groups join outpouring against Trump refugee order

Rabbi Joel Mosbacher had just finished the morning’s Shabbat service when he got an urgent message: Rabbis were needed at New York’s Kennedy Airport. People had being detained under President Donald Trump’s sharp travel restrictions on refugees. Would he come pray?

By sundown, Mosbacher was part a group of rabbis at the airport, playing guitar and conducting a Havdalah service marking the end of the Sabbath. About 2,000 people gathered to rally against the new policy.

“We know what it’s like to be the stranger,” said Mosbacher, a Reform rabbi at Temple Shaary Tefila, noting that Jewish refugees were at times turned away from the U.S. “As a person of faith, it was so important to be there.”

From pulpits to sidewalk vigils, clergy have been part of a religious outpouring against Trump’s plan to suspend refugee entry from seven majority Muslim countries. Faith leaders who support the president’s executive order as a way to fight terrorism have been far less vocal, ceding the religious discussion to those overwhelmingly opposed to the president’s sweeping immigration order, which suspends refugee admissions for four months and indefinitely bars refugees from Syria.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which runs the largest refugee resettlement network in the country, said it “strongly disagreed” with the prohibitions and pledged to work “vigorously to ensure refugees are humanely welcomed.” The Orthodox Union, the largest association for American Orthodox synagogues, acknowledged the complexities of fighting terror, but said “discrimination of any group solely upon religion is wrong and anathema to the great traditions of religious and personal freedoms upon which this country was founded.”

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Plea in murder case from unlikely spot: the victim, a priest

ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. (AP) — The Rev. Rene Robert devoted his life to helping society’s most troubled, working with drug addicts and criminals, and even signing a “Declaration of Life” that called for his killer to be spared execution in the event of his murder.

More than two decades after filing that document, his wish will be tested.

Robert’s body — shot multiple times — was found in the Georgia woods last year after a multistate manhunt led to the arrest of Steven Murray, a repeat offender Robert had been trying to help for months. Police said Murray asked the 71-year-old priest for a ride in Jacksonville, Florida, then kidnapped him and drove him across the state line. Days later, Murray led officers to the priest’s body, police said.

Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty if Murray is convicted of murder, citing the slaying’s aggravated nature. That decision was based on the facts alone, Augusta Judicial Circuit District Attorney Ashley Wright told The Associated Press.

“We don’t look at whether the victim is a priest, a nun, a philanthropist, a drug dealer or something else,” she said.

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Police stymied in search for twins missing 10 years

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Two weeks after child welfare workers removed four children from a woman’s suburban Pittsburgh home in June for alleged neglect, they discovered an even bigger problem: The woman has two other children who are missing, and haven’t been seen alive for more than a decade.

Since the summer, police investigators have cast a wide net for twins Ivon and Inisha, who would be about 18 now. A county detective has testified he believes the children are dead but can’t prove it. A cadaver-sniffing dog came up empty during a search of another Pittsburgh area house in December.

Patricia Fowler was arrested in August on charges of concealing the whereabouts of her twins after police investigated following the removal of four of her other children. Fowler has claimed the children are safe and living out of state, but no information she’s provided to police has panned out, authorities said. She’s been free on bail.

As police try to solve the mystery, they have filed additional charges against Fowler, 47, accusing her of illegally collecting more than $50,000 in state food stamps, public assistance and medical benefits for the twins. As of Friday, she had not yet surrendered on the new counts, which include theft.

A criminal complaint filed Wednesday said she had been collecting benefits for the twins since June 2011, and continued doing so through the end of August — weeks after police charged her with concealing the twins’ whereabouts. Her public defender would not comment, citing an office policy to not commenting on pending investigations.

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Where are the trees? Not Paris, new ‘Green View Index’ finds

BOSTON (AP) — Where are the trees? More important, where aren’t the trees? A lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is helping some of the world’s cities answer both questions in an attempt to make them more pleasant places to live and work.

In an effort to enhance the critical role trees play in urban environments — providing cooling shade, alleviating air and noise pollution, and easing the effects of climate change — the school’s Senseable City Lab has developed an online platform that maps out the canopy in some major cities to make it easier for urban planners and ordinary citizens to see where more are needed.

The project, called Treepedia, uses Google Street View to create what the MIT team calls the Green View Index.

Trees block shortwave radiation and increase water evaporation, creating more comfortable microclimates and mitigating air pollution, lab director Carlo Ratti said. But they also just make people feel better, Ratti said, channeling Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s biophilia theory that humans innately seek out connections with nature.

“We as humans have a natural willingness and desire to be in green spaces,” he said.

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‘A Dog’s Purpose’ opens to $18.4 million amid controversy

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Opening in theaters amid controversy over animal treatment on set and calls for a boycott, “A Dog’s Purpose” still managed to earn $18.4 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Tracking expectations had pegged the family film to open in the mid $20-million range, but it had a healthy debut nonetheless for a movie that cost only $22 million to produce.

Representatives of Universal Pictures, which distributed the Amblin-produced film starring Dennis Quaid, say the opening was in line with their hopes.

Audiences gave the film an “A” CinemaScore, indicating that word of mouth should be positive going forward.

“It’s a great start for what I think is going to be a long-term playout on the title,” said Nick Carpou, Universal’s president of domestic distribution.