In Brief: Nation & World: 2-28-17
Big surge for military in Trump budget, big cuts elsewhere
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is proposing a huge $54 billion surge in U.S. military spending for new aircraft, ships and fighters in his first federal budget while slashing big chunks from domestic programs and foreign aid to make the government “do more with less.”
The Trump blueprint, due in more detail next month, would fulfill the Republican president’s campaign pledge to boost Pentagon spending while targeting the budgets of other federal agencies. The “topline” figures emerged Monday, one day before Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress, an opportunity to re-emphasize the economic issues that were a centerpiece of his White House run.
Domestic programs and foreign aid would as a whole absorb a 10 percent, $54 billion cut from currently projected levels — cuts that would match the military increase. The cuts would be felt far more deeply by programs and agencies targeted by Trump and his fellow Republicans, like the Environmental Protection Agency as well as foreign aid. Veterans’ programs would be exempted, as would border security, additional law enforcement functions and some other areas.
“We’re going to start spending on infrastructure big. It’s not like we have a choice — our highways, our bridges are unsafe, our tunnels,” the president told a group of governors at the White House on Monday. He added, “We’re going to do more with less and make the government lean and accountable to the people.”
However, Trump’s final version of the budget is sure to leave large deficits intact — or even add to them if he follows through on his campaign promise for a huge tax cut.
———
Trump looks to refocus his presidency in address to Congress
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s first address to Congress gives him a welcome opportunity to refocus his young administration on the core economic issues that helped him get elected — and, his allies hope, to move beyond the distractions and self-inflicted wounds that have roiled his White House.
Trump’s advisers say he will use his prime-time speech Tuesday to declare early progress on his campaign promises, including kick-starting construction of his proposed southern border wall, and to map a path ahead on thorny legislative priorities, including health care and infrastructure spending.
“We spend billions in the Middle East, but we have potholes all over the country,” Trump said Monday as he previewed the address during a meeting with the nation’s governors. “We’re going to start spending on infrastructure big.”
Republicans, impatient to begin making headway on an ambitious legislative agenda, hope Trump arrives on Capitol Hill armed with specifics on replacing the “Obamacare” health law and overhauling the nation’s tax system, two issues he’s so far talked about in mostly general terms. More broadly, some Republicans are anxious for the president to set aside his feuds with the media, the intelligence community and the courts, which have overshadowed the party’s policy priorities.
“Results aren’t going to come from that,” said Judd Gregg, the former Republican senator from New Hampshire. “Results are going to come from driving the policies he said he would do.”
———
Advocacy groups: Forget Oscars snafu, focus on ‘Moonlight’
Yes, the Great Mistake of Oscars 2017 made history in all the wrong kinds of ways. But a day later, advocacy groups and others overjoyed by the Cinderella win of “Moonlight” were saying, let’s forget the snafu and move on — because “Moonlight” made history in all the right kinds of ways.
The coming-of-age story of a gay black youth in a poor Miami neighborhood was made on the tiniest of budgets — $1.5 million, said director Barry Jenkins backstage. It had a mostly black cast, and was seen as the first LGBT-themed movie to win best picture in the 89-year history of the awards show.
And so, there’s no point in wondering whether the spectacular mess-up that led to “La La Land” first being announced best picture winner — incorrectly — would overshadow the “Moonlight” win, said Sarah Kate Ellis, president &CEO of GLAAD, the LGBT advocacy group. “I don’t think you CAN overshadow the ‘Moonlight’ win,” she said in an interview, while acknowledging it was “a bit upsetting that it went down that way.”
What won out, she said, was not only a strong message of diversity and inclusivity, but “hopefully the bigger dream — that Hollywood recognizes this and continues to produce films like this, so that they are not the exception but the rule.”
“So often we’ve heard from Hollywood that writers aren’t writing about these things,” Ellis said. “So having a success at this level takes that narrative out.” The reason for the film’s success, she said, was simple: “It reflects the world we live in today. Countless people can relate to it.”
———
Oscar envelopes explained: How presenters get winning names
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A look at how the Academy Awards’ winners envelopes are handled before being opened live onstage:
— The consulting firm PwC, formerly Price Waterhouse Coopers, tabulates the winners based on ballots cast by the academy’s 6,687 voting members. Unlike the nominations, which rely on a branch-specific, preferential-voting system, winners are chosen by popular vote.
— Two accountants are tasked with bringing the final results, inside sealed envelopes, to the Oscars ceremony. They are the people carrying briefcases on the red carpet, flanked by police protection. Each briefcase contains an identical set of envelopes for the show’s 24 categories. The accountants also memorize the winners.
— The two accountants are ostensibly the only people who know the winners before they are announced live on TV.
— During the telecast, the two briefcase-toting accountants are stationed in the Dolby Theatre wings, one stage left and one stage right.
———
911 call: Bar shooting suspect said he’d killed ‘Iranians’
OLATHE, Kan. (AP) — A bartender at the restaurant where a man was arrested last week for an apparently racially motivated bar shooting of two Indian men told a 911 dispatcher that the suspect admitted shooting two people, but described them as Iranian.
A recording from Henry County, Missouri, 911 reveals that the bartender warned police not to approach the building with sirens blaring or the man would “freak out” and “something bad’s going to happen.”
The man, Adam Purinton, 51, of Olathe, made his first appearance in court Monday via video link. He has been charged with first-degree murder and first-degree attempted murder. According to witnesses, Purinton yelled “get out of my country” at two 32-year-old Indian men, Srinivas Kuchibhotla and Alok Madasani, before he opened fire at Austin’s Bar and Grill in the Kansas City suburb on Wednesday evening.
Kuchibhotla was killed and Madasani injured. The two had come to the U.S. from India to study, and they worked as engineers at GPS-maker Garmin. A third patron, Ian Grillot, 24, was wounded when he tried to intervene.
After the shooting, Purinton, who is white, drove 70 miles east to an Applebee’s restaurant in Clinton, Missouri, where he made the shocking admission to the bartender.
———
Takata pleads guilty in air bag scandal, agrees to pay $1B
DETROIT (AP) — Japanese auto parts maker Takata Corp. pleaded guilty to fraud Monday and agreed to pay $1 billion in penalties for concealing an air bag defect blamed for at least 16 deaths, most of them in the U.S.
The scandal, meanwhile, seemed to grow wider when plaintiffs’ attorneys charged that five major automakers knew the devices were dangerous but continued to use them for years to save money.
In pleading guilty, Takata admitted hiding evidence that millions of its air bag inflators can explode with too much force, hurling lethal shrapnel into drivers and passengers.
The inflators are blamed for 11 deaths in the U.S. alone and more than 180 injuries worldwide. The problem touched off the biggest recall in U.S. automotive history, involving 42 million vehicles and up to 69 million inflators.
The company’s chief financial officer, Yoichiro Nomura, entered the guilty plea on Takata’s behalf in federal court in Detroit. He also agreed that Takata will be sold or merge with another company.
———
Pressure on GOP to revamp health law grows, along with rifts
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump declared Monday that “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.” Yet the opposite has long been painfully obvious for top congressional Republicans, who face mounting pressure to scrap the law even as problems grow longer and knottier.
With the GOP-controlled Congress starting its third month of work on one of its marquee priorities, unresolved difficulties include how their substitute would handle Medicaid, whether millions of voters might lose coverage, if their proposed tax credits would be adequate and how to pay for the costly exercise.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office made their job even dicier recently, giving House Republicans an informal analysis that their emerging plan would be more expensive than they hoped and cover fewer people than former President Barack Obama’s statute. The analysis was described by lobbyists speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with congressional aides.
For many in the party, those problems, while major, are outweighed by pledges they’ve made for years to repeal Obama’s 2010 law and substitute a GOP alternative. Conservatives favoring full repeal are pitted against more cautious moderates and governors looking to curb Medicaid’s costs also worry about constituents losing coverage. But Republicans see inaction as the worst alternative and leaders may plunge ahead as soon as next week with initial House committee votes on legislation.
“I believe they have left themselves no choice. Politically they must do something,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a Republican economist and health analyst, said Monday.
———
AP-NORC Poll: US teens disillusioned, divided by politics
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — In the days after President Donald Trump’s election, thousands of teenagers across the nation walked out of class in protest. Others rallied to his defense.
It was an unusual show of political engagement from future voters who may alter America’s political landscape in 2020 — or even in next year’s midterm elections.
Now, a new survey of children ages 13 to 17 conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research with the permission of their parents finds that America’s teens are almost as politically disillusioned and pessimistic about the nation’s divisions as their parents. The difference? They aren’t quite as quick to write off the future.
Eight in 10 feel that Americans are divided when it comes to the nation’s most important values and 6 in 10 say the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Nyles Adams, a 14-year-old from New York City, was in kindergarten when Barack Obama was sworn in as the nation’s first black president. Adams, the grandson of Trinidadian immigrants, remembers watching the inauguration on TV and talking with his mother about the particular significance of Obama’s election for his black, immigrant family.
———
AP Exclusive: Ex-congregants reveal years of ungodly abuse
SPINDALE, N.C. (AP) — From all over the world, they flocked to this tiny town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, lured by promises of inner peace and eternal life. What many found instead: years of terror — waged in the name of the Lord.
Congregants of the Word of Faith Fellowship were regularly punched, smacked, choked, slammed to the floor or thrown through walls in a violent form of deliverance meant to “purify” sinners by beating out devils, 43 former members told The Associated Press in separate, exclusive interviews.
Victims of the violence included pre-teens and toddlers — even crying babies, who were vigorously shaken, screamed at and sometimes smacked to banish demons.
“I saw so many people beaten over the years. Little kids punched in the face, called Satanists,” said Katherine Fetachu, 27, who spent nearly 17 years in the church.
Word of Faith also subjected members to a practice called “blasting” — an ear-piercing verbal onslaught often conducted in hours-long sessions meant to cast out devils.
———
Neighbors riled as insular Hasidic village seeks to expand
KIRYAS JOEL, N.Y. (AP) — A quickly crowding Hasidic Jewish village that is working to expand its boundaries faces opposition from neighbors who fear more urban-style development by the insular community could overrun their slice of suburbia.
“It’s going to become like New York City, like the Bronx or Brooklyn,” said Michael Queenan, mayor of the neighboring village of Woodbury, about 50 miles north of New York City. “People moved up here because they wanted a different kind of lifestyle, they wanted a little elbow room.”
Kiryas Joel is a 1.1-square-mile village of nearly 22,000 markedly different from the surrounding suburban sprawl. Sidewalks are crowded with bearded men in heavy wool coats and brimmed hats. Women in long skirts push baby carriages into bustling stores where Yiddish is spoken. Schools teem with children. And streets are lined with one tightly packed apartment after another.
Followers of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum began coming here from Brooklyn in the 1970s, hoping to create the sort of cohesive community some recalled from Europe, with large families a big part of it. Under tradition, Kiryas Joel girls marry young and start having children immediately, fueling long-term population growth. While the average Kiryas Joel family has six people, it’s not uncommon to see couples with as many as 10 children. An average of three babies are born in the village each day.
“For us, family is part of faith. It’s not something we choose,” said Malka Silberstein, a principal of a girls’ school who settled here with her family 35 years ago.
