Nation and World briefs for February 18

Cities ask federal judge to keep Trump travel ban on hold

NEW YORK (AP) — Municipalities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minneapolis and Skokie, Illinois, urged a federal judge on Friday to continue blocking aspects of Republican President Donald Trump’s travel ban.

New York City’s chief lawyer, Zachary Carter, filed papers in federal court on behalf of nearly three dozen cities. The arguments were submitted days before a judge will decide whether to extend an order that was issued the day after Trump signed the Jan. 27 executive order.

Carter and senior counsel Susan Greenberg said in the filing that the ban against people from seven predominantly Muslim countries damages the economies and cultures of the cities and harms efforts to keep cities safe, including against terrorists.

“It stranded students, separated families, disrupted travel and commerce, spread fear among our residents and visitors, and projected a message of intolerance and distrust toward members of our communities,” they wrote of the little more than a day that the ban was in effect.

They said “xenophobia and religious discrimination” are particularly harmful to cities that rely on tolerance and inclusiveness, such as New York City, where a population of more than 8 million exceeds that of 40 states, with 3 million residents born abroad. The city has an estimated 27,000 people born in the seven countries identified in the executive order, the papers said.

N. Korea: We’ll reject Malaysia autopsy of Kim half brother

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — North Korea said Friday it will reject the results of an autopsy on its leader’s estranged half brother, the victim of an apparent assassination this week at an airport in Malaysia. Pyongyang’s ambassador said Malaysian officials may be “trying to conceal something” and “colluding with hostile forces.”

Speaking to reporters gathered outside the morgue in Kuala Lumpur, North Korean Ambassador Kang Chol said Malaysia conducted the autopsy on Kim Jong Nam “unilaterally and excluding our attendance.”

Kim Jong Nam, who was 45 or 46 and had lived in exile for years, suddenly fell ill at the Kuala Lumpur airport on Monday as he waited for a flight home to Macau. Dizzy and in pain, he told medical workers at the airport he had been sprayed with a chemical. He died while being taken to a hospital.

“We will categorically reject the result of the postmortem,” Kang said, adding that the move disregarded “elementary international laws and consular laws.”

Kang said the fact that Malaysia has yet to hand over the body “strongly suggests that the Malaysian side is trying to conceal something which needs more time and deceive us, and that they are colluding with the hostile forces towards us who are desperate to harm us.”

Trump leaps back into campaign mode, raps media anew

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — Hoping to shift attention from his troubled White House, President Donald Trump hit the road Friday to deliver a pep talk to American workers and the rest of the nation, resurrecting the jobs promises that powered his election victory and pledging in a campaign-style rally to “unleash the power of the American spirit.”

But he was only a few hours away from the turmoil he has stirred in Washington when he swerved from that positive message to escalate his complaints about news coverage of his young administration.

“The FAKENEWS media … is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” he exclaimed on Twitter, singling out The New York Times and TV networks. His latest outburst came a day after he forcefully defended his administration in a marathon White House news conference, brushing aside the tumult, infighting among senior staff and setbacks in courts and Congress.

He took a more upbeat tack in South Carolina.

“We love our workers and we are going to protect our workers,” Trump declared at a Boeing plant where the company showed off its new 787-10 Dreamliner aircraft. “We are going to fight for jobs. We are going to fight for our families,” he said in a reprise of the “America First” message from his campaign.

Hitler’s phone is up for auction; bids to start at $100K

CHESAPEAKE CITY, Md. (AP) — A Maryland auction house is selling a telephone owned by Adolf Hitler.

Bill Panagopulos of Alexander Historical Auctions in Chesapeake City says occupying Russian officers gave the phone to Brig. Sir Ralph Rayner during a visit to Hitler’s Berlin bunker. Rayner’s son is now selling the red phone with a Nazi party symbol and Hitler’s name engraved on the back.

The phone is estimated at $200,000 to $300,000 and Panagopulos says bidding will start at $100,000 this weekend.

Panagopulos considers the phone a “weapon of mass destruction,” noting that the orders Hitler gave over the phone took many lives.

He says the seller and auction house hope it ends up in a museum, where people who see it “really understand what extreme fascist thinking can bring about.”

McConnell intends to replace ‘Obamacare’ without Democrats

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans will repeal and replace the health care law and overhaul the tax code without Democratic help or votes, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday.

“It’s clear that in the early months it’s going to be a Republicans-only exercise,” the Kentucky senator said at a news conference before lawmakers left for a weeklong President’s Day recess. “We don’t expect any Democratic cooperation on the replacement of Obamacare, we don’t expect any Democratic cooperation on tax reform.”

McConnell has condemned Democrats for passing Obamacare in the first place, in 2010, without any Republican votes, claiming the partisan exercise set the law up to fail. “The mess to come was inevitable,” McConnell wrote in his memoir last year.

But now he’s promising the same approach himself, in a sign that the partisanship and polarization dividing the country and Congress under President Donald Trump will not end anytime soon.

“Clearly this is not one of those bipartisan ‘Kumbaya’ moments, and so we, as Republicans, expect that both of those issues will be — which are very big issues — will have to be tackled Republican-only,” McConnell said.

Pruitt OK’d as EPA chief over environmentalists’ objections

WASHINGTON (AP) — Over the strong objections of environmental groups, the Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday, giving President Donald Trump an eager partner to fulfill his campaign pledge to increase the use of planet-warming fossil fuels.

In six years as Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt filed 14 lawsuits challenging EPA regulations that included limits on carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. He also sued over the EPA’s recent expansion of water bodies regulated under the Clean Water Act, a federal measure opposed by industries that would be forced to clean up polluted wastewater.

Pruitt’s supporters cheered his confirmation, hailing the 48-year-old Republican lawyer as the ideal pick to roll back environmental regulations they say are a drag on the nation’s economy.

“EPA has made life hard for families all across America,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “The agency has issued punishing regulations that caused many hardworking Americans to lose their jobs. Mr. Pruitt will bring much needed change.”

The vote was 52-46 as Republican leaders used their party’s narrow Senate majority to push Pruitt’s confirmation despite calls from top Democrats to delay the vote until requested emails are released next week.

Talk to babies and let them babble back to bridge word gap

WASHINGTON (AP) — Even infants can have conversations with mom or dad. Their turn just tends to involve a smile or some gibberish instead of words. That’s a key lesson from programs that are coaching parents to talk more with their babies — and recording their attempts.

At issue is how to bridge the infamous “word gap,” the fact that affluent children hear far more words before they start school than low-income kids. New research suggests intervening early can at least boost the words at-risk tots hear, and maybe influence some school-readiness factors.

One program in Providence, Rhode Island, straps “word pedometers” onto tots to record how many words a day they hear from family or caregivers — not TV. Another in New York City records video of parents practicing conversation strategies with babies too young to even say “Da-da.”

“Parents say: ‘Wow, look what I did there. I made a sound and my child smiled at me,” said Dr. Alan Mendelsohn of New York University. “The power in that is really something.”

The research was presented Friday at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.