Rain hinders search but helps nearly put out California fire
PARADISE, Calif. — Rain is helping to extinguish a deadly wildfire in Northern California’s Gold Rush country, but the moisture is also turning ash into thick paste and hindering the hunt for telltale fragments of bone that could indicate a body.
Searchers resumed their grim task Friday afternoon after a downpour eased up in Paradise, California. They fanned out across the ruins of a mobile home park, some combing debris with rakes while others lifted up twisted metal to peer underneath.
Craig Covey, who leads a search team from Southern California’s Orange County, said they were searching a mobile home park for seniors for the second time because there are people still missing whose last known address was in this neighborhood.
The searchers, many in yellow rain slickers and hard hats to protect against falling branches, looked for clues that may indicate someone couldn’t get out, such as a car in the driveway or a wheelchair ramp. They’re looking not only for bone, but anything that could be a pile of cremated ashes.
The nation’s deadliest wildfire in the past century has killed at least 84 people, and more than 560 are still unaccounted for. Despite the inclement weather, more than 800 volunteers searched for remains on Thanksgiving and again Friday, two weeks after flames swept through the Sierra Nevada foothills, authorities said.
Government asks high court to hear transgender military case
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to issue an unusually quick ruling on the Pentagon’s policy of restricting military service by transgender people. It’s the fourth time in recent months the administration has sought to bypass lower courts that have blocked some of its more controversial proposals and push the high court, with a conservative majority, to weigh in quickly on a divisive issue.
Earlier this month, the administration asked the high court to fast-track cases on the president’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which shields young immigrants from deportation. Administration officials also recently asked the high court to intervene to stop a trial in a climate change lawsuit and in a lawsuit over the administration’s decision to add a question on citizenship to the 2020 census.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, a frequent target of criticism by President Donald Trump, is involved in three of the cases. Trump’s recent salvo against the “Obama judge” who ruled against his asylum policy — not one of the issues currently before the Supreme Court — prompted Chief Justice John Roberts to fire back at the president for the first time for feeding perceptions of a biased judiciary.
Joshua Matz, publisher of the liberal Take Care blog, said the timing of the administration’s effort to get the Supreme Court involved in the issues at an early stage could hardly be worse for Roberts and other justices who have sought to dispel perceptions that the court is merely a political institution, especially since the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. At an especially sensitive moment for the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is “forcing it into a minefield that many justices would almost surely prefer to avoid,” Matz said.
The Supreme Court almost always waits to get involved in a case until both a trial and appeals court have ruled in it. Often, the justices wait until courts in different areas of the country have weighed in and come to different conclusions about the same legal question.
Named for Roman god of war, Mars isn’t very kind to visitors
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Mars has a nasty habit of living up to its mythological name and besting Earth when it comes to accepting visitors.
NASA’s InSight is the latest spacecraft to come calling, with every intent of landing and digging deeper into the planet than anything that’s come before. The lander arrives at Mars on Monday following a six-month journey.
“We’ve had a number of successful landings in a row now. But you never know what Mars will throw at you,” said Rob Grover, lead engineer for the landing team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Landing on Mars is always risky, Grover and other experts stress at every opportunity.
“Our job on the landing team is to be paranoid about what could go wrong and make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make sure things go right,” he said,
From wire sources
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S&P 500 slides into ‘correction’ for second time this year
U.S. stocks closed lower after a shortened session Friday, bumping the benchmark S&P 500 index into a correction, or drop of 10 percent below its most recent all-time high in September.
Energy companies led the market slide as the price of U.S. crude oil tumbled to its lowest level in more than a year, reflecting worries among traders that a slowing global economy could hurt demand for oil.
“Oil is really falling sharply, continuing its downward descent, and that appears to be giving investors a lot of concern that there’s slowing global growth,” said Jeff Kravetz, regional investment director at U.S. Bank Private Wealth Management. “You have that, and then you have the recent sell-off in tech and in retail, and then throw on there trade tensions and rising rates.”
Losses in technology and internet companies and banks outweighed gains in health care and household goods stocks. Several big retailers declined as investors monitored Black Friday for signs of a strong holiday shopping season.
Trading volume was lighter than usual with the markets open for only a half day after the Thanksgiving holiday.
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Alabama mall shooting leaves 1 dead, 2 wounded
HOOVER, Ala. — Police responding to a fight inside an Alabama shopping mall shot and killed a man who had brandished a weapon, authorities said Friday. Two other people were injured, including a 12-year-old girl.
The Hoover Police Department said in a statement that two men were engaged in a “physical altercation” at the glitzy Riverchase Galleria in Hoover late Thursday, when one of the men pulled out a handgun and shot the other man twice.
Two officers who were providing security at the mall heard the gunfire and approached the area. They spotted a suspect waving a pistol and shot him. He died at the scene. The Jefferson County coroner’s office identified him as 21-year-old Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford, Jr. of Hueytown.
The other shooting victim was an 18-year-old male from Birmingham. He was taken to a nearby hospital in serious condition. A 12-year-old bystander was also shot and taken to Children’s Hospital by a Hoover Fire Department rescue squad.
Police said the fight happened on the mall’s second floor concourse area, near the entrance to the Footaction shoe store. Capt. Greg Rector said Friday that investigators do not know what sparked the original confrontation between the men.
Ruling in genital mutilation case shocks women’s advocates
MINNEAPOLIS — Women’s rights advocates said they were shocked when a federal judge in Michigan ruled this week that a law protecting girls from genital mutilation was unconstitutional. They called his decision a serious blow to girls’ rights. Legal experts said the judge made clear that U.S. states have authority to ban the practice, though only about half do.
Dr. Jumana Nagarwala was among eight people charged in federal court in Michigan in connection with the genital mutilation of nine girls from Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois between 2015 and 2017. Authorities alleged that mothers brought their girls to Nagarwala when they were roughly 7 years old for the procedure.
Nagarwala has denied any crime was committed and said she performed a religious custom on girls from her Muslim sect, the India-based Dawoodi Bohra.
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US man wrote ‘God sheltered me’ before trip turned deadly
NEW DELHI — The young American, paddling his kayak toward a remote Indian island whose people have resisted the outside world for thousands of years, believed God was helping him dodge the authorities.
“God sheltered me and camouflaged me against the coast guard and the navy,” John Allen Chau wrote before he was killed last week on North Sentinel Island.
Indian ships monitor the waters around the island, trying to ensure outsiders do not go near the Sentinelese, who have repeatedly made clear they want to be left alone.
When a young boy tried to hit him with an arrow on his first day on the island, Chau swam back to the fishing boat he had arranged to wait for him offshore. The arrow, he wrote, hit a Bible he was carrying.
“Why did a little kid have to shoot me today?” he wrote in his notes, which he left with the fishermen before swimming back the next morning. “His high-pitched voice still lingers in my head.”
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1 of the last survivors of 1921 Tulsa race riot dies at 103
OKLAHOMA CITY — Olivia Hooker, one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race riots and among the first black women in the U.S. Coast Guard, has died. She was 103.
Hooker was 6 years old when one of the worst race riots in U.S. history broke out and destroyed much of a Tulsa neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street.” She hid under a table as a torch-carrying mob destroyed her family’s home, she told National Public Radio in an interview this year.
She recalled hearing the mob use an axe to destroy her sister’s piano. For a child, she said, it was horrifying trying to keep quiet.
“The most shocking was seeing people you’d never done anything to irritate would just, took it upon themselves to destroy your property because they didn’t want you to have those things,” said Hooker, who died this week at her home in New York, according to her goddaughter.
The number of deaths from the riot was never confirmed, but estimates vary from about three dozen to 300 or more. The violence began after a black man allegedly assaulted a white woman in an elevator in Tulsa.
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Pope taps experts, US cardinal to help prep for abuse summit
VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis named the Vatican’s top sex abuse investigator and a close U.S. ally to an organizing committee for a February abuse prevention summit that has become a high-stakes credibility test following a new eruption of the scandal in the U.S. and elsewhere this year.
Abuse survivors and women working at the Vatican will also contribute to the preparatory committee. Notably absent from the lineup announced Friday was Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who heads the pope’s sex abuse advisory commission, though one of his members, the Rev. Hans Zollner, is the point-person for the group.
In addition to Zollner, the committee includes Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, for a decade the Vatican’s sex crimes prosecutor, Francis appointee Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich and Indian Cardinal Oswald Gracias, a member of Francis’ key cardinal adviser group.
Francis summoned leaders of the world’s bishops’ conferences to the Vatican Feb. 21-24 after the abuse scandal erupted in his native South America and again in the U.S. and he botched the case of a Chilean bishop implicated in cover-up.
The stakes of the meeting grew exponentially after the Vatican told U.S. bishops earlier this month not to vote on proposed new measures to investigate sexual misconduct or cover-up within their ranks.